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

Sailors ought never to go to church. They ought to go to hell, where it is much more comfortable.

Cynicism is humor in ill health.

What really matters is what you do with what you have.

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.

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.

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.

We recognized that the justice we expected and hoped for was not about to be achieved.

You’re the perfect girl’, he said, rubbing his chin. ‘You expect nothing.

Would Americans accept if we decided to come here and decide who your rulers should be? So why do you expect us Iranians to accept the idea that the United States shall come in there and decide who shall govern us?

We no longer expect the sensory world to satisfy us.

They should not expect an immediate reaction in return for their positive measures. It will take time.

It began early in the revolution. It was a process that was unfolding on a daily basis. We expected the system to be dispensing justice, but every day that passed by.

[In] every revolution, there is a great divergence between what the revolutionaries expect and what the revolution actually accomplishes.

Sometimes love is quite, lingering in the background until you least expect it. But love it always there for you