No one asks public men to be strictly moral, but they must seem to be well-behaved.

You can't argue with a raging want. You can, but it is useless.

A nation has honor precisely as it has fleas - on this or that body. The statesman who talks of honor - unless he means something else, quite different - is a rogue.

a writer's first duty is to be clear. Clarity is an excellent virtue. Like all virtues it can be pursued at ruinous cost. Paid, so far as I am concerned, joyfully.

jealousy, the most hideous emotion any human being ever suffers, has nothing to do with the mind. Or not at first.

Nationalism will keep its venom until we succeed in creating an image of the nations of the whole world as so many provinces.

In what touches their social convictions, most persons do not think. The threat of change, with all it suggests to them in the loss of social and economic privilege, alarms so deeply that they are incapable of unprejudiced thought. They seem to themselves to be thinking, with lucidity and fairness, but since they start from the conviction that change must undoubtedly be for the worse or from settled grief at the thought of losing what is old and lovely, they are doing no more than following a logical sequence of ideas from a false premise.