“We possess nothing certainly except the past.”

Here I am,’ I thought, ‘back from the jungle, back from the ruins. Here, where wealth is no longer gorgeous and power has no dignity.

You don’t remove the evil in a person by killing the person.

Port is not for the very young, the vain and the active. It is the comfort of age and the companion of the scholar and the philosopher.

My children weary me. I can only see them as defective adults: feckless, destructive, frivolous, sensual, humorless.

I read the newspapers with lively interest. It is seldom that they are absolutely, point-blank wrong. That is the popular belief, but those who are in the know can usually discern an embryo of truth, a little grit of fact, like the core of a pearl, round which have been deposited the delicate layers of ornament.

I’m quite deaf now; such a comfort.

Every Englishman abroad, until it is proved to the contrary, likes to consider himself a traveller and not a tourist.

The great charm in argument is really finding one’s own opinions, not other people’s.

News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read.

I regard writing not as an investigation of character but as an exercise in the use of language, and with this I am obsessed.

I should like to bury something precious in every place where I’ve been happy and then, when I’m old and ugly and miserable, I could come back and dig it up and remember.

Charm is the great English blight. It does not exist outside these damp islands. It spots and kills anything it touches. It kills love; it kills art; I greatly fear, my dear Charles, it has killed you.

Money is only useful when you get rid of it. It is like the odd card in ‘Old Maid’; the player who is finally left with it has lost.

There’s only one great evil in the world today. Despair.

Perhaps host and guest is really the happiest relation for father and son.

Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.

In the depths of my heart I can’t help being convinced that my dear fellow-men, with a few exceptions, are worthless.

Man, wonderful man, must collapse, into nature’s cauldron, he is no deity, he is no exception.

For 244 years our democracy has worked and this is no exception.

I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect – in terror.

The world needs saints, and all of us, without exception, are called to holiness. We are not afraid!

We don’t need no culture except revolutionary culture. What we mean by that is a culture that will free you.

There are no constraints on the human mind, no walls around the human spirit, no barriers to our progress except those we ourselves erect.

Wars have never hurt anybody except the people who die.