“We know when we have had enough of a friend, and we know when a friend has had enough of us. The first truth is no more palatable than the second.”

Necessity knows no Sunday.

Edged tools are dangerous things to handle, and not infrequently do much hurt.

There are many ways of asking a favor; but to assume that you are granting the favor that you ask shows spirit and invention.

The cat dwells within the circle of her own secret thoughts.

Democracy forever teases us with the contrast between its ideals and its realities, between its heroic possibilities and its sorry achievements.

The soul begins to travel when the child begins to think.

The great dividing line between books that are made to be read and books that are made to be bought is not the purely modern thing it seems. We can trace it, if we try, back to the first printing-presses.

The tourist may complain of other tourists, but he would be lost without them.

The audience is the controlling factor in the actor’s life. It is practically infallible, since there is no appeal from its verdict. It is a little like a supreme court composed of irresponsible minors.

It was hard to speed the male child up the stony heights of erudition, but it was harder still to check the female child at the crucial point, and keep her tottering decorously behind her brother.

Cats, even when robust, have scant liking for the boisterous society of children, and are apt to exert their utmost ingenuity to escape it. Nor are they without adult sympathy in their prejudice.

Humor brings insight and tolerance. Irony brings a deeper and less friendly understanding.

It is not what we learn in conversation that enriches us. It is the elation that comes of swift contact with tingling currents of thought.

No rural community, no suburban community, can ever possess the distinctive qualities that city dwellers have for centuries given to the world.

The English possess too many agreeable traits to permit them to be as much disliked as they think and hope they are.

There was no escape from the letter-writer who, a hundred or a hundred and twenty-five years ago, captured a coveted correspondent. It would have been as easy to shake off an octopus or a boa-constrictor.

I am pissed off at your insensitive inability to understand why I’m pissed off in the first place.

When you are in your teenage years you are consciously experiencing everything for the first time, so adolescent stories are all beginnings. There are never any endings.

The first law of economics is that when the price goes up, consumption comes down. This is a divine law.

The fight against corruption is successful if you prevent corruption taking place in the first place.

My first wife was a theater person.

The first time I heard Clyde McPhatter singing with the Dominoes at the Apollo I just fell off my chair

The fight against corruption is not bound to high-profile arrests and high-profile investigations.

When I was 15 I became a full-time singer in a band. At 18 I made my first record.