A cynic is not merely one who reads bitter lessons from the past; he is one who is prematurely disappointed in the future.

Advertising is legalized lying.

Go away. I'm all right. (Last words)

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

Humanity either makes, or breeds, or tolerates all its afflictions.

In all the round world of Utopia there is no meat. There used to be. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughterhouses. And, in a population that is all educated, and at about the same level of physical refinement, it is practically impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig... I can still remember as a boy the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughterhouse.

One of the darkest evils of our world is surely the unteachable wildness of the Good.

The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.

The lawgiver, of all beings, most owes the law allegiance. He of all men should behave as though the law compelled him. But it is the universal weakness of mankind that what we are given to administer we presently imagine we own.

The man who raises a fist has run out of ideas.

The past is but the beginning of a beginning.

To be honest, one must be inconsistent.

We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century -- for several centuries. The three or four years course of lectures, the bachelor who knows some, the master who knows most, the doctor who knows all, are ideas that have come down unimpaired from the Middle Ages. Nowadays no one should end his learning while he lives and these university degrees are preposterous. It is true that we have multiplied universities greatly in the past hundred years, but we seem to have multiplied them altogether too much upon the old pattern.