“The past is but the past of a beginning.”

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

Some people bear three kinds of trouble – the ones they’ve had, the ones they have, and the ones they expect to have.

In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.

One of the darkest evils of our world is surely the unteachable wildness of the Good.

There’s nothing wrong in suffering, if you suffer for a purpose. Our revolution didn’t abolish danger or death. It simply made danger and death worthwhile.

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.

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.

We begin to realise that the molecular scattering of light in liquids may possess an astronomical significance, in fact contribute in an important degree to the observed albedo of the earth.

It is difficult to know at what moment love begins; it is less difficult to know that it has begun.

When the child begins to think and to make use of the written language to express his rudimentary thinking, he is ready for elementary work; and this fitness is a question not of age or other incidental circumstance but of mental maturity.

Covetousness is both the beginning and the end of the devil’s alphabet – the first vice in corrupt nature that moves, and the last which dies.

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you’re older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

To fly as fast as thought, you must begin by knowing that you have already arrived.

A man can get discouraged many times but he is not a failure until he begins to blame somebody else and stops trying.

I don’t like to live in fear about things like rumors and backlash to begin with – that’s the way I was raised – but I just can’t see what’s so wrong about being gay.