Contented, unambitious people are all very well in their way. They form a neat, useful background for great portraits to be painted against, and they… - Jerome K. Jerome

I don't believe any man ever existed without vanity, and if he did he would be an extremely uncomfortable person to have anything to do with. He would, of course, be a very good man, and we should respect him very much. He would be a very admirable man—a man to be put under a glass case and shown round as a specimen—a man to be stuck upon a pedestal and copied, like a school exercise—a man to be reverenced, but not a man to be loved, not a human brother whose hand we should care to grip. Angels may be very excellent sort of folk in their way, but we, poor mortals, in our present state, would probably find them precious slow company. Even mere good people are rather depressing. It is in our faults and failings, not in our virtues, that we touch one another and find sympathy. We differ widely enough in our nobler qualities. It is in our follies that we are at one.

...we abolished
marriage two hundred years ago. You see, married life did not
work at all well with our system. Domestic life, we found, was
thoroughly anti-socialistic in its tendencies. Men thought more of
their wives and families than they did of the State. They wished to
labour for the benefit of their little circle of beloved ones rather
than for the good of the community.

Fox-terriers are born with about four times as much original sin in them as other dogs are, and it will take years and years of patient effort on the part of us Christians to bring about any appreciable reformation in the rowdiness of the fox-terrier nature.