“Leaders should lead as far as they can and then vanish. Their ashes should not choke the fire they have lit.”

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.

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.