To be original is to discover the commonplace of a thousand years--to face at first the sneer that no one would have thought of it, and at last the indifference because any one would.

A vice is a failure of desire

Crowds speak in heroes.

What was invented two thousand years ago was the spirit of Christianity.

Cities are the huge central dynamos of all being. The power of a man can be measured today by the mile, the number of miles between him and the city that is, between him and what the city stands for -- the centre of mass.

Christmas it too large to be tucked away in the toe of a child's stocking.

We have had the stone age we have had the iron age and now we have the sky age, and the sky telegraph, and sky men, and sky cities. Mountains of stone are built out of men's visions. Towers and skyscrapers swing up out of their wills and up out of their hearts.

Turning the other cheek is a kind of moral jiu-jitsu.

It is never the machines that are dead. It is only the mechanically-minded men that are dead.

The idea ... that collective society should take hold of Evil and set it down hard in its chair and make it cry seems to many of us absolutely sound. Of course, we feel that it is not for us, those who love righteousness, to jump on the necks of the wicked. We prefer to have it attended to in a more dignified, impersonal way by Society as a whole.

No man living in a world as interesting as this ever writes a book if he can help it.

The new industrial world is coming to us one new free-born industry at a time.

New York is the capital, the national headquarters of homelessness.... No one feels he belongs here.

I have seen that Man moves over with each new generation into a bigger body, more awful, more reverent and more free than he has had before.

The problem of living in this modern world is the problem of finding room in it. The crowd principle is so universally at work through modern life that the geography of the world had been changed to conform to it. We live in crowds. We get our living in crowds. We are amused in herds.

When America has been discovered in America it will be discovered in Europe. They are looking for America now.