The mass of the reading public is not interested in learning and assimilating the results of accurate investigation.

A man who has humility will have acquired in the last reaches of his beliefs the saving doubt of his own certainty.

What each man does is based not on direct and certain knowledge, but on pictures made by himself or given to him...

The man who will follow precedent, but never create one, is merely an obvious example of the routineer. You find him desperately numerous in the civil service, in the official bureaus. To him government is something given as unconditionally, as absolutely as ocean or hill. He goes on winding the tape that he finds. His imagination has rarely extricated itself from under the administrative machine to gain any sense of what a human, temporary contraption the whole affair is. What he thinks is the heavens above him is nothing but the roof.

There is only one purpose to which a whole society can be directed by a deliberate plan. That purpose is war, and there is no other.

In the blood of the martyrs to intolerance are the seeds of unbelief

Almost always tradition is nothing but a record and a machine-made imitation of the habits that our ancestors created. The average conservative is a slave to the most incidental and trivial part of his forefathers glory - to the archaic formula which happened to express their genius or the eighteenth-century contrivance by which for a time it was served.