“Most people now seem to treasure anything they value in proportion to the extent that it’s followed about and surrounded by the vulgar public.”

It is all very well to say that children are happier with mud pies and rag dolls than with these elaborate delights.

Thou canst not serve both cod and salmon.

She suspected him of infidelity, with and without reason, morning, noon and night.

A morbid propensity that causes great suffering in domestic life is often curiously infectious to the very person for whom it creates most suffering.

When I see a cheerful young man shrieking about how full of life he is, banging on a drum, and blowing on a tin trumpet, and speaking of his good spirits

There may be something in this theory, but when their amusements are carried to such a point of luxurious and imaginative perfection it certainly gives them great and even unlimited enjoyment at the time.

Many women I know think the ideal of happiness is to be in love with a great man, or to be the wife of a great public success; to share his triumph! They forget you share the man as well!

I suggested to Oscar Wilde that he should go a step further than these minor poets; he should publish a book all margin; full of beautiful, unwritten thoughts.

People were not charmed with Eglantine because she herself was charming, but because she was charmed.

You don’t know a woman until you have had a letter from her.

When a passion is not realized … it fades away, or becomes ideal worship–Dante–Petrarch–that sort of thing!

Modesty is a valuable merit … in people who have no other, and the appearance of it is extremely useful to those who have.

Most people would far rather be seen through than not be seen at all.

There is, of course, no joy so great as the cessation of pain; in fact all joy, active or passive, is the cessation of some pain, since it must be the satisfaction of a longing, even perhaps an unconscious longing.

Suspense is torture … but delightful–or there’d be no gambling in the world.

You don’t really know a woman until she writes you a letter.

And to the extent that we do not violate any known laws of the universe, we can probably make it work the way that we want to.

To the extent that President Trump means strengthened border security, I am fully in favor of the idea that the rule of the law, secure borders and public safety should prevail. Drugs should not enter illegally.

I dont think just scaring people is enough. That worked during the freeze days to a major extent, but we really didnt achieve that much even at that time.

So, half a dozen of us tried – not all of us in history – and we all eventually got in. So, to that extent, it [The History Boys] comes out of my own experience.

The highest measure of democracy is neither the ‘extent of freedom’ nor the ‘extent of equality’, but rather the highest measure of participation.

I thought it was time to show some of it, to show some of my feelings about things and what I preferred at the time. I prefer them still but not to the extent I did at the time.

The religions of the world must be assessed, not on the basis of their convoluted theologies, but in terms of the extent to which they serve as forces of liberation and empowerment.

Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves, break with complacency, numbness, despair.