A citizen can hardly distinguish between a tax and a fine, except that the fine is generally much lighter.
Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists.
Price is a crazy and incalculable thing, while Value is an intrinsic and indestructible thing.
Business, especially big business, is now organized like an army. It is, as some would say, a sort of mild militarism without bloodshed; as I say, a militarism without the military virtues.
All but the hard hearted man must be torn with pity for this pathetic dilemma of the rich man, who has to keep the poor man just stout enough to do the work and just thin enough to have to do it.
From the standpoint of any sane person, the present problem of capitalist concentration is not only a question of law, but of criminal law, not to mention criminal lunacy.
There is only one thing that stands in our midst, attenuated and threatened, but enthroned in some power like a ghost of the Middle Ages: the Trade Unions.
Our society is so abnormal that the normal man never dreams of having the normal occupation of looking after his own property. When he chooses a trade, he chooses one of the ten thousand trades that involve looking after other people’s property.
The real argument against aristocracy is that it always means the rule of the ignorant. For the most dangerous of all forms of ignorance is ignorance of work.
Making the landlord and the tenant the same person has certain advantages, as that the tenant pays no rent, while the landlord does a little work.
You can’t have the family farm without the family.
The decay of society is praised by artists as the decay of a corpse is praised by worms.
Savages and modern artists are alike strangely driven to create something uglier than themselves. but the artists find it harder.
The beautification of the world is not a work of nature, but a work of art, then it involves an artist.
And all over the world, the old literature, the popular literature, is the same. It consists of very dignified sorrow and very undignified fun. Its sad tales are of broken hearts; its happy tales are of broken heads.
The aim of good prose words is to mean what they say. The aim of good poetical words is to mean what they do not say.
A good Moslem king was one who was strict in religion, valiant in battle, just in giving judgment among his people, but not one who had the slightest objection in international matters to removing his neighbour’s landmark.
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.
The new school of art and thought does indeed wear an air of audacity, and breaks out everywhere into blasphemies, as if it required any courage to say a blasphemy. There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.
The professional soldier gains more and more power as the general courage of a community declines.