“While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness in not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful.”

In politics, strangely enough, the best way to play your cards is to lay them face upwards on the table.

There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.

We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century – for several centuries.

It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men’s lives should not pay with their own.

I had rather be called a journalist than an artist.

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.

The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.

The uglier a man’s legs are, the better he plays golf – it’s almost a law.

The past is but the past of a beginning.

Leaders should lead as far as they can and then vanish. Their ashes should not choke the fire they have lit.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.

Human history in essence is the history of ideas.

I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.

Heresies are experiments in man’s unsatisfied search for truth.

The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have been on the one hand, and the thing we have made and the things we have made of ourselves on the other.