Nothing in education is so astonishing as the amount of ignorance it accumulates in the form of inert facts.
No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.
Everyone carries his own inch rule of taste, and amuses himself by applying it, triumphantly, wherever he travels.
History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.
Unity is vision; it must have been part of the process of learning to see.
I think that Lee should have been hanged. It was all the worse that he was a good man and a fine character and acted conscientiously. It’s always the good men who do the most harm in the world.
We combat obstacles in order to get repose, and when got, the repose is insupportable.
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.