101 Quotes by John Buchan

"Civilisation needs more than the law to hold it together. You see, all mankind are not equally willing to accept as divine justice what is called human law."

"I once played the chief part in a rather exciting business without ever once budging from London . And the joke of it was that the man who went out to look for adventure only saw a bit of the game, and I who sat in my chambers saw it all and pulled the strings. 'They also serve who only stand and wait,' you know."

"It was foreordained that I should go alone to Umvelos', and in the promptings of my own infallible heart I believed I saw the workings of Omnipotence. Such is our moral arrogance, and yet without such a belief I think that mankind would have ever been content to bide sluggishly at home."

"Fortunately for mankind the brain in a life of action turns more to the matter in hand than to conjuring up the chances of the future."

"The vows we take in the holy place bind us till we are purged of them at Inanda's Kraal. Till then no blood must be shed and no flesh eaten. It was the fashion of our forefathers."

"Young girls passed me with romance still in their eyes, and others, a little older, with the romance dead."

"In our modern world we have seen inaugurated the reign of a dull bourgeois rationalism, which finds some inadequate reason for all things in heaven and earth and makes a god of its own infallibility."

"Any large-scale organization must lose some of the merits of its rudimentary beginnings. Quantity will have a coarsening effect on quality."

"London is like the tropical bush -- if you don't exercise constant care the jungle, in the shape of the slums, will break in."

"But some love not the method of your first; Romance they count it, throw't away as dust; If I should meet with such, what should I say; Must I slight them as they slight me, or nay"