Nothing is often a good thing to do and always a good thing to say.

Men decided that it was better to pay taxes than to fight among themselves; better to pay tribute to one magnificent robber than to bribe them all.

Sixty years ago I knew everything. Now I know nothing. Education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.

Education is the transmission of civilization.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

Drunkenness was in good repute in England till "Bloody Mary" frowned upon it; it remained popular in Germany. The French drank more stably, not being quite so cold.

A history of civilization shares the presumptuousness of every philosophical enterprise: it offers the ridiculous spectacle of a fragment expounding the whole. Like philosophy, such a venture has no rational excuse, and is at best but a brave stupidity; but let us hope that, like philosophy, it will always lure some rash spirits into its fatal depths.