What I Believe, by E.M. Forster (1938)

Every time I read Forster he seems more relevant and more contemporary. Just look at the first paragraph few sentences:

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I do not believe in Belief. But this is an Age of Faith, and there are so many militant creeds that, in self-defence, one has to formulate a creed of one's own. Tolerance, good temper and sympathy are no longer enough in a world which is rent by religious and racial persecution, in a world where ignorance rules, and Science, who ought to have ruled, plays the subservient pimp.

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Could have been written today. :-(

"I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country."

That's fine, and that is probably how most of us who aren't Ancient Romans think. However, that is also the way that swaths of the German judiciary and bureaucracy thought as it undermined the Weimar Republic, and that is also the way a lot of the hard-core Japanese militarists thought. Either of them would have said, I suppose, that they served the nation while betraying the state; but it comes down to much the same thing in effect.

He believes in an aristocracy of the sensitive, the considerate and the plucky to save us.