I have never said that human society ought to be aristocratic, but a great deal more than that. What I have said, and still believe with ever-increasing conviction, is that human society is always, whether it will or no, aristocratic by its very essence, to the extreme that it is a society in the measure that it is aristocratic, and ceases to be such when it ceases to be aristocratic. Of course I am speaking now of society and not of the State. the Revolt of the Masses

The longest-lived and the shortest-lived man, when they come to die, lose one and the same thing. Book II

Let an understanding man imagine human nature originally produced without the sense of sight, and consider what ignorance and trouble such a defect would bring upon him, what a darkness and blindness in the soul; he will then see by that of how great importance to the knowledge of truth would be the privation of such another sense, or of two or three, should we be so deprived. Essays

“But I come from no country, from no city, no tribe. I am the son of the road, my country is the caravan, my life the most unexpected of voyages.” Leo Africanus