Death is more tragic even than death by starvation. Having a nose
is more comic even than having a Norman nose.

This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential
things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things
they hold separately. And the second principle is merely this:
that the political instinct or desire is one of these things
which they hold in common. Falling in love is more poetical than
dropping into poetry. The democratic contention is that government
(helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love,
and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something
analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum,
discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop,
being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish
a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary,
a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing
one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself,
even if he does them badly. I am not here arguing the truth of any
of these conceptions; I know that some moderns are asking to have
their wives chosen by scientists, and they may soon be asking,
for all I know, to have their noses blown by nurses. I merely
say that mankind does recognize these universal human functions,
and that democracy classes government among them. In short,
the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things
must be left to ordinary men themselves--the mating of the sexes,
the rearing of the young, the laws of the state. This is democracy;
and in this I have always believed.

But there is one thing that I have never from my youth up been
able to understand. I have never been able to understand where people