We want to get rid of the militarist not simply because he hurts and kills, but because he is an intolerable thick-voiced blockhead who stands hectoring and blustering in our way of achievement.
And all over the countryside, he knew, on every crest and hill, where once the hedges had interlaced, and cottages, churches, inns, and farmhouses had nestled among their trees, wind wheels similar to those he saw and bearing like vast advertisements, gaunt and distinctive symbols of the new age, cast their whirling shadows and stored incessantly the energy that flowed away incessantly through all the arteries of the city. ... The great circular shapes of complaining wind-wheels blotted out the heavens.
You have, let us say, a promising politician, a rising artist that you wish to destroy. Dagger or bomb are archaic, clumsy and unreliable - but teach him, inoculate him with chess.
We can't have any weak or silly. Life is real again, and the useless and cumbersome and mischievous have to die. They ought to die. They ought to be willing to die. It's a sort of disloyalty, after all, to live and taint the race.
The too perfect security of the Upper-worlders had led them to a slow movement of degeneration, a general dwindling in size, strength, and intelligence.
A day will come when beings, now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon Earth as a footstool and laugh, and reach out their hands amidst the stars.
I am prepared to maintain that Honesty is essentially an anarchistic and disintegrating force in society, that communities are held together and the progress of civilization made possible only by vigorous and sometimes even, violent Lying; that the Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie and humbug themselves and one another for the general Good.
The British Islands are small islands and our people numerically a little people. Their only claim to world importance depends upon their courage and enterprise, and a people who will not stand up to the necessity of air service planned on a world scale, and taking over thousands of aeroplanes and thousands of men from the onset of peace, has no business to pretend anything more than a second rate position in the world. We cannot be both Imperial and mean.
Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.
Even men who were engaged in organizing debt-serf cultivation and debt-serf industrialism in the American cotton districts, in the old rubber plantations, and in the factories of India, China, and South Italy, appeared as generous supporters of and subscribers to the sacred cause of individual liberty.
There is no more evil thing in this world than race prejudice, none at all. [...] It justifies and holds together more baseness, cruelty, and abomination than any other sort of error in the world.