I feel for all faiths the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest urchin in the streets.

If man asks for many laws it is only because he is sure that his neighbor needs them; privately he is an unphilosophical anarchist, and thinks laws in his own case superfluous.

Read, think well of mankind, go to our libraries and rejoice.

Civilization exists by geological consent, subject to change without notice.

History repeats itself in the large because human nature changes with geological leisureliness.

History is so indifferently rich, that a case for almost any conclusion from it can be made by a selection of instances.

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.