‘I feel: therefore I exist.’ I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them matter. I feel them changing place. This gives me motion. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it void, or nothing, or immaterial space. On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.

The light of history is pitiless; it has this strange and divine quality that, all luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, it often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, and the darkness of the despot struggles with the splendour of the captain. Hence results a truer measure in the final judgment of the nations. Babylon violated lessens Alexander; Rome enslaved lessens Caesar; massacred Jerusalem lessens Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. It is woe to a man to leave behind him a shadow which has his form.

There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action.

The discovery that man can be scientifically manipulated, and that governments can turn large masses this way or that as they choose, is one of the causes of our misfortunes. There is as much difference between a collection of mentally free citizens and a community molded by modern methods of propaganda as there is between a heap of raw materials and a battleship.

The Monuments that mightie Monarches reare,
Colosso’s statues, and Pyramids high,
In tract of time, doe moulder downe and weare,
Ne leave they any little memorie,
    The Passenger may warned be to say,
    They had their being here, another day.

But wise wordes taught, in numbers sweet to runne,
Preserved by the living Muse for aie,
Shall still abide, when date of these is done,
Nor ever shall by Time be worne away:
    Time, Tyrants, Envie, World assay thy worst,
    Ere Homer die, thou shalt be fired first.

If a man be wealthy, no matter how he gets it, of what parentage, how qualified, how virtuously endowed or villainously inclined; let him be a bawd, a gripe, a usurer, a villain, a pagan, a barbarian, a wretch, Lucian’s tyrant, “on whom you may look with less security than on the sun”; so that he be rich (and liberal withal) he shall be honoured, admired, adored, reverenced, and highly magnified.