Intimates are predestined.
An artist’s business is only to see.
As for piracy, I love to be pirated. It is the greatest compliment an author can have. The wholesale piracy of Democracy was the single real triumph of my life. Anyone may steal what he likes from me.
Every syllable that can be struck out is pure profit, and every page that can be economised is a five-per-cent dividend. Nature rebels against this rule; the flesh is weak, and shrinks from the scissors; I groan in retrospect over the weak.
No historian can take part with – or against – the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should merely be a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.
Average human nature is very coarse, and its ideals must necessarily be average. The world never loved perfect poise. What the world does love is commonly absence of poise, for it has to be amused.
The Jewish question is really the most serious of our problems.
My belief is that science is to wreck us, and that we are like monkeys monkeying with a loaded shell; we don’t in the least know or care where our practically infinite energies come from or will bring us to.
The proof that a philosopher does not know what he is talking about is apt to sadden his followers before it reacts on himself.
Boys naturally look on all force as an enemy.
As a historian, he felt it his duty to respect everything that had ever been respected, except for the occasional statesman.
You can’t use tact with a Congressman! A Congressman is a hog! You must take a stick and hit him on the snout!
Politics are a very unsatisfactory game.
Church and State, Soul and Body, God and Man, are all one at Mont Saint Michel, and the business of all is to fight, each in his own way, or to stand guard for each other.
The mind resorts to reason for want of training.
History is a tangled skein that one may take up at any point, and break when one has unravelled enough.
Mathematicians practice absolute freedom.
By nature, man is lazy, working only under compulsion; and when he is strong we will always live, as far as he can, upon the labor or the property of the weak.
Every one must bear his own universe, and most persons are moderately interested in learning how their neighbors have managed to carry theirs.
The woman who is known only through a man is known wrong.