When "everyone knows" that something is so, it is always more interesting and often illuminating to assumeexactly the opposite, and to see where that leads.
The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world... The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us.
Islam was something like a Christian heresy. The early heresies had been full of mad reversals and evasions of the Incarnation, rescuing their Jesus from the reality of his body even at the expense of the sincerity of his soul.
Posting a letter and getting married [sic] are among the few things left that are entirely romantic; for to be entirely romantic, a thing must be irrevocable
You!" he cried. "You never hated because you never lived. I know what you are all of you, from first to last--you are the people in power! You are the police--the great, fat smiling men in blue and buttons! You are the Law, and you have never been broken. But is there a free soul alive that does not long to break you, only because you have never been broken?
The Party System was founded on one national notion of fair play. It was the notion that folly and futility should be fairly divided between both sides.
Sir Hiram Maxim is a genuine and typical example of the man of science, romantic, excitable, full of real but somewhat obvious poetry, a little hazy in logic and philosophy, but full of hearty enthusiasm and an honorable simplicity. He is, as he expresses it, "an old and trained engineer," and is like all of the old and trained engineers I have happened to come across, a man who indemnifies himself for the superhuman or inhuman concentration required for physical science by a vague and dangerous romanticism about everything else.
There is no such thing as Success....That a thing is successful merely means that it is; a millionaire is successful in being a millionaire and a donkey in being a donkey.
The old assumption of the approximate impossibility of war really rested on a similar assumption about the impossibility of evil-and especially of evil in high places.
Every sane man recognises that unlimited liberty is anarchy, or rather is nonentity. The civic idea of liberty is to give the citizen a province of liberty; a limitation within which a citizen is a king.