We Stand Above by Aleister Crowley in International, Dec 1917.

“Was not the library of Alexandria worth more to mankind than the whole Roman Empire? Were not the stained glass windows of the churches of more importance than the entire struggle between Protestant and Catholic? The people who do not understand this are Huns.” [via]

Consider also:

  1. “IN normal times art and literature take care of themselves. Wisdom is justified of her children. Before we have been dead three hundred years somebody is almost sure to notice it. The great mass of people is a homogeneous mass of brainless idiocy. Men are dumb animals, and women only quack. In times of peace the hack journalists are as inconspicuous as they are insignificant; but when war breaks out the hysteria natural to weak minds becomes vocal, and everybody wants to ‘do his bit’ on one side or the other, by squealing when much the best thing to do would be to bury himself.”
  2. “We feel rather as the President feels about the Vigilantes. If well-meaning asses were only mules how useful they might be in batteries!”
  3. "In such circumstances the German can hardly be blamed for thinking that we are set upon their utter destruction, and this thought is bound to destroy in them all considerations of mercy and kindness, or even ordinary reasonableness."
  4. “IT is a somewhat invidious task; but we suppose that some one has got to do it, and it seems as if that some one had to be ourselves.”
  5. “The idea of resisting repression is a totally wrong one. Christ submitted willingly to what is generally admitted to be the greatest crime ever perpetrated, although, as he himself explained, he had twelve legions of angels actually mobilized, which would have made as short work of the Romans as the angels of Mons did of the Germans in the early part of the war.”