“The greater the man, the less is he opinionative, he depends upon events and circumstances.”

“A man is worked upon by what he works on.
He may carve out his circumstances,
but his circumstances will carve him out as well.”

“Professor Whitehead has recently restored a seventeenth century phrase—"climate of opinion." The phrase is much needed. Whether arguments command assent or not depends less upon the logic that conveys them than upon the climate of opinion in which they are sustained.”

“Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.”

“If a man looks upon any other man and estimates that man as less than himself, then he is stealing from the other. He is stealing the other's birthright - that of equality.”

“The historian is not only a lover of truth, not only a chronicler of events. These, indeed, he must be at his peril, but how much more! Insight into human nature—and this implies the rarest knowledge and finest sympathy of which man is capable; the power of tracing the delicate relation between deed and motive, and the pressure of action upon circumstance and circumstance upon action; knowledge of the world, in short, in the highest sense of that expression.”

“When you hear that a certain man is so good that he wants to help everybody, you may depend upon it that he started the story.”

“The character of every act depends upon the circumstances in which it is done.”

“It is more true to say that our opinions depend upon our lives and habits than to say that our lives depend upon our opinions, which is only now and then true.”

“[…] the virtues of a medicine depend less upon its intrinsic properties and powers than on the sagacity of the physician who administers it; just as the efficiency of firearms depends less upon the explosives and the missile they contain than on the judgment and accuracy of aim of the man who discharges them.”