“Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic.”

If you asked me now who I am, the only answer I could give with any certainty would be my name. For the rest: my loves, my hates, down even to my deepest desires, I can no longer say whether these emotions are my own, or stolen from those I once so desperately wished to be.

O God, make me good, but not yet.

I did not know it was possible to be so miserable and live but I am told that this is a common experience.

The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are.

A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.

We possess nothing certainly except the past.

I put the words down and push them a bit.

It is easy, retrospectively, to endow one’s youth with a false precocity or a false innocence; to tamper with the dates marking one’s stature on the edge of the door.

If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be.

Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else.

One forgets words as one forgets names. One’s vocabulary needs constant fertilizing or it will die.

Manners are especially the need of the plain. The pretty can get away with anything.

If a thing’s worth doing at all, it’s worth doing well.

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.

O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin.

You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being.

There are some with brains and some without. It makes for a better division of labour.

A world where greed is our God and wisdom is sin, where division is key and unity is fantasy, where the ego-driven cleverness of the mind is praised, rather than the intelligence of the heart.

There is no division nor subtraction in the heart-arithmetic of a good mother. There are only addition and multiplication.

Free markets. What does this system mean? The answer is simple: it is the market economy, it is the system in which the cooperation of individuals in the social division of labor is achieved by the market.

Across the continent, political divisions are deepening. For all of these reasons, the specter of a euro zone collapse has not been dispatched.

In communal society, where there are virtually no class divisions, man’s productive activities on outlook and culture is less discernible. Account must be taken of the psychology of conflicting classes.

In this decisive hour of our national history, union means life and division means death.

The division of the spoils between the victors will also provide employment for a powerful office, whose doorsteps the greedy adventurers and jealous concession hunters of twenty or thirty nations will crowd and defile.