The soul of a civilization is its religion, and it dies with its faith.

Hunting is now to most of us a game, whose relish seems based upon some mystic remembrance, in the blood, of ancient days when to hunter as well as hunted it was a matter of life and death.

A great civilization is not conquered from without, until it has destroyed itself from within. The essential causes of Rome's decline lay in her people, her morals, her class struggle, her failing trade, her bureaucratic despotism, her stifling taxes, her consuming wars.

The trouble with most people is that they think with their hopes or fears or wishes rather than with their minds.

Peace is an unstable equilibrium, which can be preserved only by acknowledged supremacy or equal power.

If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children.

The Islamic conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precious good, whose delicate complex of order and freedom, culture and peace, can at any moment be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within.