Obviously if any actions, even a lunatic’s, can be causeless, determinism is done for. If the chain of causation can be broken for a madman, it can be broken for a man.
If a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ’s.
Precisely because our political speeches are meant to be reported, they are not worth reporting. Precisely because they are carefully designed to be read, nobody reads them.
You can free things from alien or accidental laws, but not from the laws of their own nature. You may, if you like, free a tiger from his bars; but do not free him from his stripes.
The new community which the capitalists are now constructing will be a very complete and absolute community; and one which will tolerate nothing really independent of itself.
The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.
To say that a man is an idealist is merely to say that he is a man.
Against a dark sky all flowers look like fireworks. There is something strange about them, at once vivid and secret, like flowers traced in fire in the phantasmal garden of a witch.
If the common man in the past had a grave respect for property, it may conceivably have been because he sometimes had some of his own.
The Universe is the most extraordinary masterpiece ever constructed by nobody.
The determining bulk of Scotch people had heard of golf ever since they had heard of God and often considered the two as of equal importance.
I am a journalist and have no earthly motives except curiosity and personal vanity.
A great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it.
If an editor can only make people angry enough, they will write half his newspaper for him for nothing.
The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.
There is nothing so weak, for working purposes, as this enormous importance attached to immediate victory. There is nothing that fails like success.
As an explanation of the world materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has the quality of a madman’s arguments; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out.
One can hardly think too little of one’s self. One can hardly think too much of one’s soul.
The historic glory of America lies in the fact that it is the one nation that was founded like a church. That is, it was founded on a faith that was not merely summed up after it had exited, but was defined before it existed.
No man can be merry unless he is serious.