“CIVILISATION is not to be judged by the rapidity of communication, but by the value of what is communicated.”

There’s a lot of difference between listening and hearing.

Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.

The greatest political storm flutters only a fringe of humanity. But an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children literally alter the destiny of nations.

An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.

Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.

When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

And when it rains on your parade, look up rather than down. Without the rain, there would be no rainbow.

The golden age only comes to men when they have forgotten gold.

It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.

I have known many happy marriages, but never a compatible one. The whole aim of marriage is to fight through and survive the instant when incompatibility becomes unquestionable. For a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.

There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.

The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.

The problem of disbelieving in God is not that a man ends up believing nothing. Alas, it is much worse. He ends up believing anything.

Stick to the man who looks out of the window and tries to understand the world. Keep clear of the man who looks in at the window and tries to understand you.

If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgment.

No civilization is complete which does not include the dumb and defenseless of God’s creatures within the sphere of charity and mercy.

Civilization may be said indeed to be the creation of its outlaws.

By the same right under which France took Flanders, Lorraine and Alsace, and will sooner or later take Belgium — by that same right Germany takes over Schleswig; it is the right of civilisation as against barbarism, of progress as against stability.

Bare-faced covetousness was the moving spirit of civilization from its first dawn to the present day; wealth, and again wealth, and for the third time wealth; wealth, not of society, but of the puny individual, was its only and final aim.

Wherever we look, the work of the chemist has raised the level of our civilization and has increased the productive capacity of the nation.

We must have no carelessness in our dealings with public property or the expenditure of public money. Such a condition is characteristic either of an undeveloped people, or of a decadent civilization. America is neither.

From the first day to this, sheer greed was the driving spirit of civilization.

Peace on earth would mean the end of civilization as we know it.