No man thinks there is much ado about nothing when the ado is about hi — Anthony Trollope

"You can never teach them, except by the slow lesson of habit."

"As will so often be the case when a men has a pen in his hand. It is like a club or sledge-hammer, — in using which, either for defence or attack, a man can hardly measure the strength of the blows he gives."

"There is nothing perhaps so generally consoling to a man as a well-established grievance; a feeling of having been injured, on which his mind can brood from hour to hour, allowing him to plead his own cause in his own court, within his own heart, — and always to plead it successfully."

"There is such a difference between life and theory."

"Satire, though it may exaggerate the vice it lashes, is not justified in creating it in order that it may be lashed."

"Success is the necessary misfortune of life, but it is only to the very unfortunate that it comes early."

"I should say that when people talk about capitalism its a bit of a joke. Theres no such thing. No country, no business class, has ever been willing to subject itself to the free market, free market discipline. Free markets are for others. Like, the Third World is the Third World because they had free markets rammed down their throat. Meanwhile, the enlightened states, England, the United States, others, resorted to massive state intervention to protect private power, and still do. Thats right up to the present. I mean, the Reagan administration for example was the most protectionist in post-war American history. Virtually the entire dynamic economy in the United States is based crucially on state initiative and intervention: computers, the internet, telecommunication, automation, pharmaceutical, you just name it. Run through it, and you find massive ripoffs of the public, meaning, a system in which under one guise or another the public pays the costs and takes the risks, and profit is privatized. Thats very remote from a free market. Free market is like what India had to suffer for a couple hundred years, and most of the rest of the Third World."

"He, who begins by loving Christianity better than Truth, will proceed by loving his own Sect or Church better than Christianity, and end in loving himself better than all."

"I believe that the unity of man as opposed to other living things derives from the fact that man is the conscious life of himself. Man is conscious of himself, of his future, which is death, of his smallness, of his impotence; he is aware of others as others; man is in nature, subject to its laws even if he transcends it with his thought."

"You cant manage yourself, Root. How do you expect to manage others?"

"Do not try to make the brilliant pupil a replica of yourself."

"I believe that man is in the last resort so free a being that his right to be what he believes himself to be cannot be contested."