All the inducements of early society tend to foster immediate action; all its penalties fall on the man who pauses; the traditional wisdom of those times was never weary of inculcating that 'delays are dangerous,' and that the sluggish man - the man 'who roasteth not that which he took in hunting' - will not prosper on the earth, and indeed will very soon perish out of it. And in consequence an inability to stay quiet, an irritable desire to act directly, is one of the most conspicuous failings of mankind.

One of the greatest pains to human nature is the pain of a new idea.

I wish the art of benefiting men had kept pace with the art of destroying them; for though war has become slow, philanthropy has remained hasty. The most melan…

The great difficulty which history records is not that of the first step, but that of the second step. What is most evident is not the difficulty of getting a …

In the long run an opinion often borrows credit from the forbearance of its patrons.

The world's become a little too mean.

On a very rough-and-ready basis we might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having determined what the law is, ins…