“I never could see anything wrong in sensationalism; and I am sure our society is suffering more from secrecy than from flamboyant revelations.” 

“With all that we hear of American hustle and hurry, it is rather strange that Americans seem to like to linger on longer words.”

“It is true that I am of an older fashion; much that I love has been destroyed or sent into exile.”

“I think the oddest thing about the advanced people is that, while they are always talking about things as problems, they have hardly any notion of what a real problem is.”

“Over-civilization and barbarism are within an inch of each other. And a mark of both is the power of medicine-men.” 

“By experts in poverty I do not mean sociologists, but poor men.” –

“The modern city is ugly not because it is a city but because it is not enough of a city, because it is a jungle, because it is confused and anarchic, and surging with selfish and materialistic energies.”

“Self-denial is the test and definition of self-government.” 

“Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.” 

“Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.”

“America is the only country ever founded on a creed.” – “What is America?”

“The Declaration of Independence dogmatically bases all rights on the fact that God created all men equal; and it is right; for if they were not created equal, they were certainly evolved unequal. There is no basis for democracy except in a dogma about the divine origin of man.”

“The unconscious democracy of America is a very fine thing. It is a true and deep and instinctive assumption of the equality of citizens, which even voting and elections have not destroyed.” 

“When you break the big laws, you do not get freedom; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.”

“Men are ruled, at this minute by the clock, by liars who refuse them news, and by fools who cannot govern.”

“If you attempt an actual argument with a modern paper of opposite politics, you will have no answer except slanging or silence.” 

“He is a very shallow critic who cannot see an eternal rebel in the heart of a conservative.” 

“You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution. 

“For fear of the newspapers politicians are dull, and at last they are too dull even for the newspapers.” 

“When a politician is in opposition he is an expert on the means to some end; and when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it.” 

“It is the mark of our whole modern history that the masses are kept quiet with a fight. They are kept quiet by the fight because it is a sham-fight; thus most of us know by this time that the Party System has been popular only in the sense that a football match is popular.” 

“I have formed a very clear conception of patriotism. I have generally found it thrust into the foreground by some fellow who has something to hide in the background. I have seen a great deal of patriotism; and I have generally found it the last refuge of the scoundrel.”

“It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged.” 

“There cannot be a nation of millionaires, and there never has been a nation of Utopian comrades; but there have been any number of nations of tolerably contented peasants.” 

“All government is an ugly necessity.”

“It is hard to make government representative when it is also remote.”

“It is a good sign in a nation when things are done badly. It shows that all the people are doing them. And it is bad sign in a nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is merely looking on.” 

“The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of the Conservatives is to prevent the mistakes from being corrected.” 

“War is not ‘the best way of settling differences;’ it is the only way of preventing their being settled for you.”

“The only defensible war is a war of defense.”

The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.”

“There is a corollary to the conception of being too proud to fight. It is that the humble have to do most of the fighting.” 

“How quickly revolutions grow old; and, worse still, respectable.” 

“Progress should mean that we are always changing the world to fit the vision, instead we are always changing the vision.”

“My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.” 

“Men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.

“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.” 

“The modern world is a crowd of very rapid racing cars all brought to a standstill and stuck in a block of traffic.”

“Comforts that were rare among our forefathers are now multiplied in factories and handed out wholesale; and indeed, nobody nowadays, so long as he is content to go without air, space, quiet, decency and good manners, need be without anything whatever that he wants; or at least a reasonably cheap imitation of it.” 

“A detective story generally describes six living men discussing how it is that a man is dead. A modern philosophic story generally describes six dead men discussing how any man can possibly be alive.” 

“None of the modern machines, none of the modern paraphernalia. . . have any power except over the people who choose to use them.” 

“I still hold. . .that the suburbs ought to be either glorified by romance and religion or else destroyed by fire from heaven, or even by firebrands from the earth.” 

“The whole curse of the last century has been what is called the Swing of the Pendulum; that is, the idea that Man must go alternately from one extreme to the other. It is a shameful and even shocking fancy; it is the denial of the whole dignity of the mankind. When Man is alive he stands still. It is only when he is dead that he swings.”

“To hurry through one’s leisure is the most unbusiness-like of actions.”

“This is the age in which thin and theoretic minorities can cover and conquer unconscious and untheoretic majorities.”

“The past is not what it was.”

“Do not enjoy yourself. Enjoy dances and theaters and joy-rides and champagne and oysters; enjoy jazz and cocktails and night-clubs if you can enjoy nothing better; enjoy bigamy and burglary and any crime in the calendar, in preference to the other alternative; but never learn to enjoy yourself.

“Do not look at the faces in the illustrated papers. Look at the faces in the street.”

“When giving treats to friends or children, give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them.”

“I agree with the realistic Irishman who said he preferred to prophesy after the event.”