Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.
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.
There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.
We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century – for several centuries.
When she was fifteen if you’d told her that when she was twenty she’d be going to bed with bald-headed men and liking it, she would have thought you very abstract.
Very simple was my explanation, and plausible enough – as most wrong theories are!
This has ever been the fate of energy in security; it takes to art and to eroticism, and then comes languor and decay.
Things that would have made fame of a less clever man seemed tricks in his hands. It is a mistake to do things too easily.
I stood staring, not as yet realising that this was death leaping from man to man in that little distant crowd.
Civilization is in a race between education and catastrophe. Let us learn the truth and spread it as far and wide as our circumstances allow. For the truth is the greatest weapon we have.
The man was running away with the rest, and selling his papers for a shilling each as he ran – a grotesque mingling of profit and panic.
We can’t have any weak or silly. Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It’s a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race.
They haven’t any spirit in them – no proud dreams and no proud lusts; and a man who hasn’t one or the other-Lord! What is he but funk and precautions.
After people have repeated a phrase a great number of times, they begin to realize it has meaning and may even be true.
Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of the organized life.
We must be prepared to see an Association of Nations in conference growing into an organic system of world controls for world affairs and the keeping of the world’s peace, or we must be prepared for – a continuation of war.
If the world does not please you, you can change it.
So utterly at variance is Destiny with all the little plans of men.
It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble.
Cycle trails will abound in Utopia.