The universal regard for money is the one hopeful fact in our civilization. Money is the most important thing in the world. It represents health, strength, honor, generosity and beauty . . . . Not the least of its virtues is that it destroys basic people as certainly as it fortifies and dignifies noble people.
Worst of all, there is no sign of any relaxation of antisemitism. Logically it has nothing to do with Fascism. But the human raceis imitative rather than logical; and as Fascism spreads antisemitism spreads.
My own education has been entirely controversial: that is why I know what I am writing about; and appear eccentric to dogmatically educated Old School Ties whose heads are stuffed with obsolete shibboleths.
We must not stay as we are, doing always what was done last time, or we shall stick in the mud. Yet neither must we undertake a new world as catastrophic Utopians, and wreck our civilization in our hurry to mend it.
When a man teaches something he does not know to somebody else who has no aptitude for it, and gives him a certificate of proficiency, the latter has completed the education of a gentleman.
A man's interest in the world is only the overflow from his interest in himself. When you are a child your vessel is not yet full;so you care for nothing but your own affairs. When you grow up, your vessel overflows; and you are a politician, a philosopher, or an explorer and adventurer. In old age the vessel dries up: there is no overflow: you are a child again.
Plato long ago pointed out the importance of being governed by men with sufficient sense of responsibility and comprehension of public duties to be very reluctant to undertake the work of governing.
Geniuses are horrid, intolerant, easily offended, sleeplessly self-conscious men, who expect their wives to be angels with no further business in life than to pet and worship their husbands. Even at the best they are not comfortable men to live with; and a perfect husband is one who is perfectly comfortable to live with.
A healthy nation is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a person's nationality it will think of nothing else but getting it set again.