Treat a man as he is, and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he could be, and he will become what he should be.
The life of the honest man must be an apostasy and a perpetual desertion. The honest man must be a perpetual renegade, the life of an honest man must be a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful to truth must make himself continually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable renascent errors. And the man who wishes to remain faithful to justice must make himself continually unfaithful to inexhaustibly triumphant injustices.
If the world is to change for the better it must start with a change in human consciousness, in the very humanness of modern man.
A man may steal and be punished as a thief, or perform good deeds and be commended, but the power of Consciousness, which remains only a witness, is neither thief nor good man.
Treat a man as he is and he will remain as he is. Treat a man as he can and should be and
he will become as he can and should be.
Man is above all else mind, consciousness — that is, he is a product of history, not of nature.
We must recognise the essential underlaying savagery in the animal called man, and return to older and sounder principles of national life and defense. We must realise that man's nature will remain the same so long as he remains man; that civilisation is but a slight coverlet beneath which the dominant beast sleeps lightly and ever ready to awake.
Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.
No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself.
There comes a time in every man's life when he must make way for an older man.