Socialism may be worthless as a scheme, but it is not meaningless as a symptom. Rousseau's theory of the origin of society, of the social contract, and of a cure for all the social evils by a return to a state of nature, had, as we all know now, no more relation to fact than the dreams of an illiterate drunkard; but they were not without value as a vague and symbolical expression of certain evils from which the France of his day was suffering.
The landscape of the mind, against which our thoughts and expectations move, when the wind of the imagination is active, changes as quickly as the clouds; and indeed it consists often of several landscapes, semi-transparent and showing through one another.
No one is fit to encounter an adversary's case successfully unless he can make it for a moment his own, unless he can put it more forcibly than the adversary could put it for himself, and take account not only of what the adversary says, but also the best he MIGHT say, if only he had chanced to think it.
Politics are always a struggle for power, disguised and modified by prudence, reason and moral pretext.
If a man wishes to ensure the bad opinion of others, his best course probably is to be honest about himself.
Civilisation is never so charming as when it is an island in the middle of simplicity, or of a civilisation of an alien kind.
Whatever may be God's future, we cannot forget His past.
Landscapes, even when their general type is similar, are capable of as many expressions as the same type of human face, and, without our being able fully to tell why, affect our spirits as we look at them with as many moods and meanings.
