The first principle of a civilized state is that power is legitimate only when it is under contract.

Men fall into a routine when they are tired and slack: it has all the appearance of activity with few of its burdens.

Because the results are expressed in numbers, it is easy to make the mistake of thinking that the intelligence test is a measure like a foot ruler or a pair of scales. It is, of course, a quite different sort of measure. Intelligence is not an abstraction like length and weight; it is an exceedingly complicated notion - which nobody has yet succeeded in defining.

It is easier to develop great power than it is to know how to use it wisely.

Ideals are an imaginative understanding of that which is desirable in that which is possible.

I generalized rashly: That is what kills political writing, this absurd pretence that you are delivering a great utterance. You never do. You are just a puzzled man making notes about what you think. You are not building the Pantheon, then why act like a graven image? You are drawing sketches in the sand which the sea will wash away.

There is nothing so bad but it can masquerade as moral.