Quotes from Randolph Bourne

Society is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.

We can easily become as much slaves to precaution as we can to fear. Although we can never rivet our fortune so tight as to make it impregnible, we may by our excessive prudence squeeze out of the life that we are guarding so anxiously all the adventurous quality that makes it worth living.

All we can ever do in the way of good to people is to encourage them to do good to themselves.

Friendships are fragile things, and require as much handling as any other fragile and precious thing.

If you are not an idealist by the time you are twenty you have no heart, but if you are still an idealist by the time you are thirty, you don't have a head.

A cultivation of the powers of one's personality is one of the greatest needs of life.

A man with few friends is only half-developed; there are whole sides of his nature which are locked up and have never been expressed. He cannot unlock them himself, he cannot even discover them; friends alone can stimulate him and open him.

War is the health of the state.

One keeps healthy in wartime...by a vigorous assertion of values in which war has no part.

Diplomacy is a disguised war, in which states seek to gain by barter and intrigue, by the cleverness of arts, the objectives which they would have to gain more clumsily by means of war.

Our real duty is always found running in the direction of our worthiest desires.

We may by our excessive prudence squeeze out of the life we are guarding so anxiously all the adventurous quality that makes it worth living.

With the shock of war the state comes into its own again.

Society is one vast conspiracy for carving one into the kind of statue likes, and then placing it in the most convenient niche it has.

We can easily become as much slaves to precaution as we can to fear.

Good friendships are fragile things and require as much care as any other fragile and precious thing.

Friendships are fragile things, and require as much handling as any other fragile and precious...