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Progress is measured by richness and intensity of experience - by a wider and deeper apprehension of the significance and scope of human existence.
The worth of a civilization or a culture is not valued in the terms of its material wealth or military power, but by the quality and achievements of its representative individuals - its philosophers, its poets and its artists.
I am not going to claim that modern anarchism has any direct relation to Roman jurisprudence; but I do claim that it has its basis in the laws of nature rather than in the state of nature.
The sensitive artist knows that a bitter wind is blowing.
A man of personality can formulate ideals, but only a man of character can achieve them.
The characteristic political attitude of today is not one of positive belief, but of despair.
The greatest intensification of the horrors of war is a direct result of the democratisation of the State. So long as the army was a professional unit, the specialist function of a limited number of men, war remained a relatively harmless contest for power. But once it became everyman's duty to defend his home (or his political “rights”) warfare was free to range wherever that home might be, and to attack every form of life and property associated with that home.
Modern man has been in search of a new language of form to satisfy new longings and aspirations - longings for mental appeasement, aspirations to unity, harmony, serenity - an end to his alienation from nature. All these arts of remote times or strange cultures either give or suggest to the modern artist forms which he can adapt to his needs, the elements of a new iconography.
My own early experiences in war led me to suspect the value of discipline, even in that sphere where it is so often regarded as the first essential for success.
It does not seem that the contradiction which exists between the aristocratic function of art and the democratic structure of modern society can ever be resolved.
Simplicity is not a goal, but one arrives at simplicity in spite of oneself, as one approaches the real meaning of things.
Man is everywhere still in chains.
The modern artist, by nature and destiny, is always an individualist.
Progress is measured by the degree of differentiation within a society.
Great changes in the destiny of mankind can be effected only in the minds of little children.
Perhaps it is this theory of all work and no play that has made the Marxist such a very dull boy.
It was play rather than work which enabled man to evolve his higher faculties - everything we mean by the word 'culture'.
You might think that it would he the natural desire of every man to develop as an independent personality, but this does not seem to be true.
In History, stagnant waters, whether they be the stagnant waters of custom or those of despotism, harbour no life; life is dependent on the ripples created by a few eccentric individuals. In homage to that life & vitality, the community has to brave certain perils and must countenance a measure of heresy. One must live dangerously if one wants to live at all.
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