Darkness always had its part to play. Without it, how would we know when we walked in the light? It’s only when its ambitions become too grandiose that it must be opposed, disciplined, sometimes—if necessary—brought down for a time. Then it will rise again, as it must.

I hate facts. I always say the chief end of man is to form general propositions - adding that no general proposition is worth a damn.

The most formidable people in the world, and now the most dangerous, people who... lay down the doctrine that every frontier must be the starting out point for invasion.

I regard almost all quarrels of princes on the same footing, and I see nothing that marks man's unreason so positively as war. Indeed, what folly to kill one another for interests often imaginary, and always for the pleasure of persons who do not think themselves even obliged to those who sacrifice themselves for them!

I was rather literary in college—one year I wrote a series of very solemn and obvious editorials for the 'Yale News.'—and now I was going to bring back all such things into my life and become again that most limited of all specialists, the 'well-rounded man.' This isn’t just an epigram—life is much more successfully looked at from a single window, after all.

If the only tool we use to analyse what's valuable is a price tag, then those things that don't have price tags begin to look like they have no value.