“In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.”

The path of social advancement is, and must be, strewn with broken friendships.

The past is the beginning of the beginning and all that is and has been is but the twilight of the dawn.

The path of least resistance is the path of the loser.

History is a race between education and catastrophe.

Man is the unnatural animal, the rebel child of nature, and more and more does he turn himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared him.

Biologically the species is the accumulation of the experiments of all its successful individuals since the beginning.

If we don’t end war, war will end us.

Our true nationality is mankind.

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

A time will come when a politician who has willfully made war and promoted international dissension will be as sure of the dock and much surer of the noose than a private homicide. It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men’s lives should not stake their own.

Beauty is in the heart of the beholder.

Sailors ought never to go to church. They ought to go to hell, where it is much more comfortable.

Cynicism is humor in ill health.

What really matters is what you do with what you have.

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.

We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century.

Here, in the middle of the twentieth century, with modern technology transforming everybody’s lives, you find a medieval mentality that is being dragged painfully into the eighteenth century by some forward-looking people.

Our world is limited by the machinery we carry. Its very different to the 18th and 19th century Enlightenment scientists who were mostly men of God and thought it was their quest to uncover Gods great plan.

The worst thing about being a great power is when you’re not one any more. It takes centuries to get over it.

My short answer would be that there is no greatest jazz musician of the century. Jazz, like any valid art form, finds its greatness in its expression of the human spirit, and, to me, this can’t be reduced to a contest.

There’s so much in the 21st century that is stymied by bureaucracy and mediocrity and committee.

According to Las Casas, atrocities continued unabated in the Americas, even half a century after the discovery.

That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church [by the 14th century] that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis.

The century of people helplessly seeing others, who were close to them, disappear over the horizon.