Strength is the outcome of need; security sets a premium on feebleness.

I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes—to come to this at last.

It is a law of Nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.

"There is, though I do not know how there is or why there is, a sense of infinite peace and protection in the glittering hosts of heaven. There it must be, I think, in the vast and eternal laws of matter, and not in the daily cares and sins and troubles of men, that whatever is more than animal within us must find its solace and its hope."

"We were making the future," he said, "and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is!"

The past is but the beginning of a beginning, and all that is or has been is but the twilight of the dawn.

Kipps was unprepared for the unpleasant truth; that the path of social advancement is and must be strewn with broken friendships.

And in the air are no streets, no channels, no point where one can say of an antagonist, "If he wants to reach my capital he must come by here." In the air all directions lead everywhere.

The third peculiarity of aerial warfare was that it was at once enormously destructive and entirely indecisive.