“The difficulty of literature is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.”

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.

We live in an ascending scale when we live happily, one thing leading to another in an endless series.

I am in the habit of looking not so much to the nature of a gift as to the spirit in which it is offered.

Marriage is one long conversation, chequered by disputes.

Keep your fears to yourself, but share your courage with others.

There is only one difference between a long life and a good dinner: that, in the dinner, the sweets come last.

The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.

We all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it.

Once you are married, there is nothing left for you, not even suicide.

Quiet minds cannot be perplexed or frightened but go on in fortune or misfortune at their own private pace, like a clock during a thunderstorm.

You can forgive people who do not follow you through a philosophical disquisition.

When a torrent sweeps a man against a boulder, you must expect him to scream, and you need not be surprised if the scream is sometimes a theory.

There is a fellowship more quiet even than solitude, and which, rightly understood, is solitude made perfect.

There is no progress whatever. Everything is just the same as it was thousands, and tens of thousands, of years ago. The outward form changes. The essence does not change.

The world is full of a number of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.

Socialism, on the contrary, extends its function to the description of society as it should be, and the discovery of the means of making it what it should be.

The Anarchists answer that the abolition of the State will leave in existence a defensive association, resting no longer on a compulsory but on a voluntary basis, which will restrain invaders by any means that may prove necessary.

But when I talk to people who are Darwinists or evolutionists and say, ‘Well, how did life begin’ – they’re… they don’t have an answer. I mean, they have an answer, but it’s a BS answer. It’s an answer that wouldn’t make sense to a small child.

Humility does not mean to think yourself less, but to less think of yourself.

A lie was something you told because you were mean or a coward. A story was something you made up out of something that might have happened. Only you didn’t tell it like it was, you told it like you thought it should have been.

I was hooked on writing. I mean, where else can you get paid for sticking your nose into somebody else’s business?

To me, technology was a means to an end to achieve the social justice goals, stronger democracy and more effective government that is the aim of what I do.

The most powerful presentations were based on legal precedents, especially Calvin’s Case (1608), which, it was claimed, proved on the authority of Coke and Bacon that subjects of the King are by no means necessarily subjects of Parliament.