If I were rich I would have many books, and I would pamper myself with bindings bright to the eye and soft to the touch, paper generously opaque, and type such as men designed when printing was very young. I would dress my gods in leather and gold, and burn candles of worship before them at night, and string their names like beads on a string.

Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.

Power dements even more than it corrupts, lowering the guard of foresight and raising the haste of action.

To say nothing, especially when speaking, is half the art of diplomacy.

We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive redistribution.

It may be true that you can't fool all the people all the time, but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.

So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.