The German people are an orderly, vain, deeply sentimental and rather insensitive people. They seem to feel at their best when they are singing in chorus, saluting or obeying orders.
There is no reason whatever to believe that the order of nature has any greater bias in favour of man than it had in favour of the ichthyosaur or the pterodactyl.
You Americans have the loveliest wine in the world, you know, but you don’t realize it. You call them domestic and that’s enough to start trouble anywhere.
Nothing remains interesting where anything may happen.
I do not propose to add anything to what has already been written concerning the loss of the “Lady Vain.”
Everyone leaves the world a little better some by leaving.
I often think we do not take this business of photography in a sufficiently serious spirit. Issuing a photograph is like marriage: you can only undo the mischief with infinite woe...
There is space in its philosophy for everyone which is one reason why India is a home to every single religion in the world.
Let us get together with other people of our sort and make over the world into a great world-civilization that will enable us to realize the promises and avoid the dangers of this new time.
It is the going out from oneself that is love and not the accident of its return. It is the expedition, whether it fail or succeed.
You are trying to do a more difficult thing than record folk songs; you are trying to record life.
If your life doesn’t end in failure, you haven’t reached high enough. So it was failure I had to achieve.
A biography should be a dissection and demonstration of how a particular human being was made and worked.
The Athenian democracy suffered much from that narrowness of patriotism which is the ruin of all nations.
The Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves for the general Good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual man into the social masonry.
This blessed gift of smoking!
Everywhere in the world there are ignorance and prejudice, but the greatest complex of these, with the most extensive prestige and the most intimate entanglement with traditional institutions, is the Roman Catholic Church.
The man who raises a fist has run out of ideas.
You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic, clumsy and unreliable – but teach him, inoculate him with chess.
If we do not end war – war will end us. Everybody says that, millions of people believe it, and nobody does anything.