“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.” 

“Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.”

“A change of opinions is almost unknown in an elderly military man.” 

“The act of defending any of the cardinal virtues has today all the exhilaration of a vice.”

“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.”

“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”

“Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance.”

“An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered.” 

“What embitters the world is not excess of criticism, but an absence of self-criticism.”

“He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.” –

“Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.”

“Moderate strength is shown in violence, supreme strength is shown in levity.” 

“The simplification of anything is always sensational.”

“Customs are generally unselfish. Habits are nearly always selfish.”

“I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him. The practical form it takes is this: that, while the old man may stand by some stupid custom, the young man always attacks it with some theory that turns out to be equally stupid.”

“The center of every man’s existence is a dream. Death, disease, insanity, are merely material accidents, like a toothache or a twisted ankle. That these brutal forces always besiege and often capture the citadel does not prove that they are the citadel.”

“The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade other people how good they are.”

“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”

“All the exaggerations are right, if they exaggerate the right thing.”

“The comedy of man survives the tragedy of man.” 

“We have had no good comic operas of late, because the real world has been more comic than any possible opera.”

“When learned men begin to use their reason, then I generally discover that they haven’t got any.” 

“The free man owns himself. He can damage himself with either eating or drinking; he can ruin himself with gambling. If he does he is certainly a damn fool, and he might possibly be a damned soul; but if he may not, he is not a free man any more than a dog

“Aesthetes never do anything but what they are told.” 

“The aesthete aims at harmony rather than beauty. If his hair does not match the mauve sunset against which he is standing, he hurriedly dyes his hair another shade of mauve. If his wife does not go with the wall-paper, he gets a divorce.”