Go ahead and do the impossible. It's worth the look on the faces of those who said you couldn't.

Great and terrible systems of divinity and philosophy lie round about us, which, if true, might drive a wise man mad.

I'm not the kind of writer who's able to block out the world around me. I'm mindful of our own haves and have-nots, how our culture often blames and punishes the have-nots. I worry about our precarious economic and political climate.

The real essence of work is concentrated energy - people who really have that in a superior degree by nature are independent of the forms and habits and artifices by which less able and less active people are kept up to their labors.

Persecution in intellectual countries produces a superficial conformity, but also underneath an intense, incessant, implacable doubt.

The mystic reverence, the religious allegiance, which are essential to a true monarchy, are imaginative sentiments that no legislature can manufacture in any people.

The cure for admiring the House of Lords is to go and look at it.