I think middle-age is the best time, if we can escape the fatty degeneration of the conscience which often sets in at about fifty.
Every institution not only carries within it the seeds of its own dissolution, but prepares the way for its most hated rival.
The enemies of freedom do not argue; they shout and they shoot.
Democracy is only an experiment in government, and it has the obvious disadvantage of merely counting votes instead of weighing them.
We tolerate shapes in human beings that would horrify us if we saw them in a horse.
I have no fear that the candle lighted in Palestine years ago will ever be put out.
A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbours.
Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter.
Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful or to discover something that is true.
It is astonishing with how little wisdom mankind can be governed, when that little wisdom is its own.
It is quite natural and inevitable that, if we spend sixteen hours daily of our waking lives in thinking about the affairs of the world and five minutes in thinking about God and our souls, this world will seem two hundred times more real to us than God.
We should think of the church as an orchestra in which the different churches play on different instruments while a Divine Conductor calls the tune.
A monarch frequently represents his subjects better that an elected assembly; and if he is a good judge of character he is likely to have more capable and loyal advisers.
The fruit of the tree of knowledge always drives man from some paradise or other; and even the paradise of fools is not an unpleasant abode while it is habitable.
In imperialism nothing fails like success. If the conqueror oppresses his subjects, they will become fanatical patriots, and sooner or later have their revenge; if he treats them well, and governs them for their good, they will multiply faster than their rulers, till they claim their independence.
The greatest obstacle to progress is not man’s inherited pugnacity, but his incorrigible tendency to parasitism.
Don’t get up from the feast of life without paying for your share of it.
Bereavement is the sharpest challenge to our trust in God; if faith can overcome this, there is no mountain which it cannot remove.
Man, as we know him, is a poor creature; he is halfway between an ape and a god and he is travelling in the right direction.
The wealth of a soul is measured by how much it can feel; its poverty by how little.