Patriotism is an ephemeral motive that scarcely ever outlasts the particular threat to society that aroused it.

When the missionaries first came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, “Let us pray.” We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.

We have really everything in common with America nowadays, except, of course, language.

Intolerance is evidence of impotence.

I do desire we may be better strangers.

If you wish to avoid foreign collision, you had better abandon the ocean.

I am a man: I consider nothing human alien to me.

Nationalism is an infantile disease, the measles of mankind.

Africa has her mysteries, and even a wise man cannot understand them. But a wise man respects them.

Let the French but have England, and they won’t want to conquer it.

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.

All men naturally hate each other. We have used concupiscence as best we can to make it serve the common good, but this is mere sham and a false image of charity, for essentially it is just hate.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.