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

We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century.

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 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.

When i’m wasted, i can almost forget who i am,” he said, his smile fading slightly. “i know i’m still there, but only barely. It’s a good place to be.” he tipped back the thermos, eyes on the dark sea straight ahead

I had that. I could almost feel the miles between us shrinking, as if we were at two ends of some invisible elastic thread.

Painting is something that you need to do, if not every day, then certainly most days. It is almost like being a pianist: if you stop, you lose something.

Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority.

In India the odd thing is that English is this almost artificial language floating on the surface of a place with about fifty other languages. The same is true of Nigeria but even more so.

Jesus warns people far more often about greed than about sex, yet almost no one thinks they are guilty of it.

Marley is someone before his time, man. He’s – he’s almost – he’s like a deity, like almost, you know what I mean?

He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.