“Believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail.”

All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the base of our splendid failure to do the impossible.

No matter how young you are or how old you have got. Not for kudos and not for cash: your picture in the paper nor money in the back either. Just refuse to bear them.

They say that it is the practiced liar who can deceive. But so often the practiced and chronic liar deceives only himself; it is the man who all his life has been selfconvicted of veracity whose lies find quickest credence.

Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed.

A man. All men. He will pass up a hundred chances to do good for one chance to meddle where meddling is not wanted. He will overlook and fail to see chances, opportunities, for riches and fame and welldoing, and even sometimes for evil. But he won’t fail to see a chance to meddle.

There is no such thing as bad whiskey. Some whiskeys just happen to be better than others. But a man shouldn’t fool with booze until he’s fifty; then he’s a damn fool if he doesn’t.

It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.

If people all over the world…would do this, it would change the earth.

So, never be afraid. Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed.

The best fiction is far more true than any journalism.

The quotidian demands of life distract from this resonance of images and events, but some of us feel it always.

I know now that what makes a fool is an inability to take even his own good advice.

If there is a God what the hell is He for?

Some things you must always be unable to bear. Some things you must never stop refusing to bear. Injustice and outrage and dishonor and shame.

He must train himself in ruthless intolerance-that is to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph.

Don’t be ‘a writer’. Be writing.

What I’ve learned in the last few years is that I am merely a storyteller.

Are stories a heeded warning, or merely an entertainment? Each story in the collection tries to wrestle with these questions.

Both men have an authoritarian idea of government; democracy is merely a façade.

Merely that you start off with ideas buzzing around in your head, and then you try to give them the simpler, more graceful shape, of a feeling that a reader might share.

There is no such thing as chance or accident; the words merely signify our ignorance of some real and immediate cause.

Anything that is truly an agent or the cause of any event; but they signify merely men’s ignorance of the real an immediate cause.

The intelligent person is not one who merely knows what is good and what is bad.

The intelligent person is one who, when he sees what is good, follows it, and when he sees evil, shuns it.