“It (the dash ) is a comfortable punctuation mark since even the most rigorous critic can seldom claim that any particular example of it is a misuse. Its overuse is its greatest danger, and the writer who can’t resist dashes may be suspected of uncoordinated thinking.”

The mere abhorrence of vice is not a virtue at all.

That is the essence of a witch-hunt, that any questioning of the evidence or the procedures in itself constitutes proof of complicity.

Many studies have established the fact that there is a high correlation between vocabulary and intelligence and that the ability to increase one’s vocabulary throughout life is a sure reflection of intellectual progress.

Stoicism is the wisdom of madness and cynicism the madness of wisdom.

We see what we want to see, and observation conforms to hypothesis.

Most civilized lives are measured out with coffee spoons.

Authors are magpies, echoing each other’s words and seizing avidly on anything that glitters.

For the most part our leaders are merely following out in front; they do but marshal us the way that we are going.

Legislators who are of even average intelligence stand out among their colleagues. . . .

We may be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.

Wisdom is meaningless until your own experience has given it meaning, and there is wisdom in the selection of wisdom.

A cultured college president has become as much a rarity as a literate newspaper publisher. A financier interested in economics is as exceptional as a labor leader interested in the labor movement.

Leadership is more likely to be assumed by the aggressive than by the able, and those who scramble to the top are more often motivated by their own inner torments.

The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical. . . . Any man who for one moment abandons or suspends the questioning spirit has for that moment betrayed humanity.

The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical, to demand the credentials of all statements that claim to be facts.

Lying is an indispensable part of making life tolerable.

Most of all I like “bad” lines, that is those considered bad, in my opinion unjustly, by theory. The reason for the last quotation marks is that most so-called theory is only a collection of examples from master practice.