A friend in power is a friend lost.
They know enough who know how to learn.
Knowledge of human nature is the beginning and end of political education.
Every man who has at last succeeded, after long effort, in calling up the divinity which lies hidden in a woman’s heart, is startled to find that he must obey the God he summoned.
He too serves a certain purpose who only stands and cheers.
The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.
Power when wielded by abnormal energy is the most serious of facts.
In practice, such trifles as contradictions in principle are easily set aside; the faculty of ignoring them makes the practical man.
Chaos often breeds life, when order breeds habit.
Morality is a private and costly luxury.
A society in stable equilibrium is-by definition-one that has no history and wants no historians.
Henry James chews more than he bites off.
It is impossible to underrate human intelligence – beginning with one’s own.
The whole fabric of society will go to wrack if we really lay hands of reform on our rotten institutions. From top to bottom the whole system is a fraud, all of us know it, laborers and capitalists alike, and all of us are consenting parties to it.
Unbroken Evolution under uniform conditions pleased every one – except curates and bishops; it was the very best substitute for religion; a safe, conservative practical, thoroughly Common-Law deity.
I hate photographs abstractly, because they have given me more ideas perversely and immovably wrong, than I ever should get by imagination.
Charles Sumner’s mind had reached the calm of WATER which receives and reflects images without absorbing them; it contains nothing but itself.
Silence alone is respectable and respected. I believe God to be silence.
The photograph is a coarse fraud, and seems to delight only in taking the whole beauty out of the picture.
As for America, it is the ideal fruit of all your youthful hopes and reforms. Everybody is fairly decent, respectable, domestic, bourgeois, middle-class, and tiresome. There is absolutely nothing to revile except that it’s a bore.