The vigour of civilised societies is preserved by the widespread sense that high aims are worth while. Vigorous societies harbour a certain extravagance of objectives, so that men wander beyond the safe provision of personal gratifications. All strong interests easily become impersonal, the love of a good job well done. There is a sense of harmony about such an accomplishment, the Peace brought by something worth while. Such personal gratification arises from aim beyond personality. (A.I. p. 371)

The worth of men consists in their liability to persuasion. . . . Civilisation is the maintenance of social order, by its own inherent persuasiveness as embodying the nobler alternative. The recourse to force, however unavoidable, is a disclosure of the failure of civilisation, either in the general society or in a remnant of individuals. Thus in a live civilisation there is always an element of unrest. For sensitiveness to ideas means curiosity, adventure, change. Civilised order survives on its merits, and is transformed by its power of Recognizing its imperfections. (A.I. p. 105)

The essence of life is to be found in the frustrations of established order. (M.T. p. 119)

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. Life refuses to be embalmed alive. The more prolonged the halt in some unrelieved system of order, the greater the crash of the dead society. (P.R. p. 515)

There are two principles inherent in the very nature of things, recurring in some particular embodiments whatever field we explore - the spirit of change, and the spirit of conservation. There can be nothing real without both. Mere change without conservation is a passage from nothing to nothing. . . . Mere conservation without change cannot conserve. For after all, there is a flux of circumstance, and the freshness of being evaporates under mere repetition. (S.M.W. p. 289)

No static maintenance of perfection is possible. . . . Advance or Decadence are the only choices offered to mankind. The pure conservative is fighting against the essence of the Universe. (A.I. p. 354)

It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilisation are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur:-like unto an arrow in the hand of a child. The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows. (Symb. p. 88)

In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of a defeat; but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress towards a victory. This is one great reason for the utmost toleration of variety of opinion. Once and forever, this duty of toleration has been summed up in the words," Let both grow together until the harvest." (S.M.W. p. 267)

Other nations of different habits are not enemies: they are godsends. Men require of their neighbours something sufficiently akin to be understood, something sufficiently different to provoke attention, and something great enough to command admiration. We must not expect, however, all the virtues. (S.M.W. p. 298)

Political loyalty ceases at the frontiers of radical incapacity. (A.I. p. 79)

The solution provided by the doctrine of the sole sovereignty of the State, however grateful to Protestants and to sovereigns, is both shocking and unworkable, a mere stick with which to beat Papists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a mere way to provide policemen for the countinghouses of merchants. (A.I. p. 76)

The thought of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries rationalised its political philosophy under the fiction of the "Original Contract." This concept proved itself formidable. It helped to dismiss the Stuarts into romance, to found the American Republic, and to bring a out the French Revolution. (A.I. p. 71)

The thoughts of Galileo and Newton were of supreme interest, but the habits of mankind between the dates 1690 and 1750 were very slightly altered. The total effect was that fortunate people had a new theme of intellectual enjoyment. Indeed, within this period the introduction of cheap spirits, such as gin, probably did more harm to English life than all the noble thoughts of the Royal Society did good. (Atlantic, Vol. 169, p. 175)

Today the notion of a master race is being revived, and most of us agree that it means the moral degradation of mankind. (Atlantic, Vol. 169, p. 173)

The enjoyment of power is fatal to the subtleties of life. Ruling classes degenerate by reason of their lazy indulgence in obvious gratifications. (A.I. p. 106)

It is the nemesis of the reign of force, of the worship of power, that the ideals of the semidivine rulers centre upon some variant of Solomon's magnificent harem of three hundred wives and seven hundred concubines. The variation may be toward decency, but it is equally decadent. Christianity has only escaped from the Near East with scars upon it. . . . There stands the inexorable law that apart from some transcendent aim the civilised life either wallows in pleasure or relapses slowly into a barren repetition with waning intensities of feeling. (A.I. p. 108)

War can protect; it cannot create. Indeed, war adds to the brutality that frustrates creation. The protection of war should be the last resort in the slow progress of mankind towards its far-off ideals. (Atlantic, Vol. 163, p. 320)

Desire for money will produce hard-fistedness and not enterprise. There is much more hope for humanity from manufacturers who enjoy their work than from those who continue in irksome business with the object of founding hospitals. (A.E. pp. 69-70)

The Greek insistence on the golden mean and on the virtue of moderation entered into our [British] philosophy of statesmanship, sometimes reinforcing our natural stupidity, sometimes moderating our national arrogance. (Atlantic, Vol. 138, pp. 196-7)