"The Destiny of Man is to unite, not to divide. If you keep on dividing you end up as a collection of monkeys throwing nuts at each other out of separate trees."
"Their mother is Athene, the goddess of wisdom, and, although they are often ready to play the buffoon to amuse you, such conduct is the prerogative of the truly wise."
"You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honor trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn."
"When shall I be dead and rid Of all the wrong my father did? How long, how long 'till spade and hearse Put to sleep my mother's curse?"
"There were thousands of brown books in leather bindings, some chained to the book-shelves and others propped against each other as if they had had too much to drink and did not really trust themselves. These gave out a smell of must and solid brownness which was most secure."
"In war, our elders may give the orders...but it is the young who have to fight."
"Those who lived by the sword were forced to die by it."
"There is one fairly good reason for fighting - and that is, if the other man starts it. You see, wars are a great wickedness, perhaps the greatest wickedness of a wicked species. They are so wicked that they must not be allowed. When you can be perfectly certain that the other man started them, then is the time when you might have a sort of duty to stop them."
"War is like a fire. One man may start it, but it will spread all over. It is not about one thing in particular."
"It has to be admitted that starving nations never seem to be quite so starving that they cannot afford to have far more expensive armaments than anybody else."
"Love is a trick played on us by the forces of evolution. Pleasure is the bait laid down by the same. There is only power. Power is of the individual mind but the mind's power is not enough. Power of the body decides everything in the end and only might is right."
"The race will find that capitalists and communists modify themselves so much during the ages that they end by being indistinguishable as democrats..."
"He felt in his heart cruelty and cowardice, the things which made him brave and kind."
"It is so fatally easy to make young children believe that they are horrible."
"It is good to put your life in other people's hands."
"Mordred and Agravaine thought Arthur hypocritical—as all decent men must be, if you assume that decency can’t exist."
"It is only people who are lacking, or bad, or inferior, who have to be good at things. You have always been full and perfect, so you had nothing to make up for."
"So Merlyn sent you to me," said the badger, "to finish your education. Well, I can only teach you two things -- to dig, and love your home. These are the true end of philosophy."
"Now, in their love, which was stronger, there were the seeds of hatred and fear and confusion growing at the same time: for love can exist with hatred, each preying on the other, and this is what gives it its greatest fury."
"Don't kill me,' said the knight. 'I yield. I yield. You can't kill a man at mercy.'Lancelot put up his sword and went back from the knight, as if he were going back from his own soul. He felt in his heart cruelty and cowardice, the things which made him brave and kind.'Get up,' he said. 'I won't hurt you. Get up, go.'The knight looked at him, on all fours like a dog, and stood up, crouching uncertainly.Lancelot went away and was sick."
"It is the bad people who need to have principles to restrain them."
"Perhaps man was neither good nor bad, was only a machine in an insensate universe--his courage no more than a reflex to danger, like the automatic jump at the pin-prick. Perhaps there were no virtues, unless jumping at pin-pricks was a virtue, and humanity only a mechanical donkey led on by the iron carrot of love, through the pointless treadmill of reproduction."