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"And all this, I said, just as today was the case with the beginnings of wireless, would be of no more service to man than as an escape from himself and his true aims, and a means of surrounding himself with an ever closer mesh of distractions and useless activities."

Our whole civilisation was a cemetery where Jesus Christ and Socrates, Mozart and Haydn, Dante and Goethe were but indecipherable names on mouldering stone

A man cannot live intensely except at the cost of the self.

The bourgeois is consequently by nature a creature of weak impulses, anxious, fearful of giving himself away and easy to rule.

'Most men will not swim before they are able to.' Is nit that witty? Naturally, they won't swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And naturally they won't think. They are made for life, not for thought.

"as speed increases, time appears to shrink, and space to expand"

Oxford and Cambridge had been disastrously slow to introduce science and engineering courses to their curricula. Civil service exams for Foreign Service through the 1880s weighed Greek and Latin higher than scores in the natural sciences.

"Plantations are worth nothing in themselves, were it not for the vast number of slaves they have on them"

There are no great crimes of which sn intelligent man does not feel capable.

".Wit, however, is a dangerous gift for a preacher, a politician or a professor - he is certain to offend the stupid persons who are always in a majority"

Log cabins were introduced to America by the Swedes and Finns on the Delaware

If men desire a people to degenerate speedily, to corrupt their minds and bodies, & to lure in thieves and spoilers from abroad, let them seek a rich soil that yields much with little labour. But if they desire that piety & godliness should prosper, accompanied by sobriety, justice, & love, let them choose a country such as this, like France or England, which yields sufficiency only through hard labour and industry.

Try as it might, the skyscraper has yet to overcome the spirit of the forest - the immensity, the melancholy.

"The faster the aeroplane flies, the less important are France, Spain, and Italy. They were nations, now they are provinces, and tomorrow they will be the world's villages."

"As I get older, life seems more and more beautiful, but living is more and more difficult"

Be always prepared for disappointments

"May men of great understanding are too wise, and of too great spirits to labour after wealth; or if they do, their designs are unsuccessful"

But as for men, they are ignorant of future things. No man knows so much as who shall be his heir, or enjoy the estate which he has laboured for.