“There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age.”

Despite all our toil and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.

There’s one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die – their silence.

That God has managed to survive the inanities of the religions that do Him homage is truly a miraculous proof of His existence.

Love is the magician that pulls him out of his own hat.

A wise man will always allow a fool to rob him of ideas without yelling “Thief.” If he is wise he has not been impoverished. Nor has the fool been enriched. The thief flatters us by stealing. We flatter him by complaining.

The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.

He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.

They’re a symbol of the whole town, pretending to fight, love, weep and laugh all the time – and they’re phonies, all of them. And I head the list…their phony hearts were dripping with the milk of human kindness.

When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance.

Criticism can never instruct or benefit you. Its chief effect is that of a telegram with dubious news. Praise leaves no glow behind, for it is a writer’s habit to remember nothing good of himself.

Of the things men give each other the greatest is loyalty.

The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.

Out of the seventy movies I’ve written some ten of them were not entirely waste product.

I haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls and bookshops.

Three years ago, the white hope of the theatre. Today, a mug. That’s New York for you. Puts you on a Christmas tree, and then – the alley.

Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.

Good entrepreneurs can manage, but no one but an entrepreneur can entrepreneur, let alone help build and lead the world’s community of leading social entrepreneurs and their top business entrepreneur allies.

For art to be ‘unpolitical’ means only to ally itself with the ‘ruling’ group.

These allies are the hallucinogenic plants and the mysterious teaching entities, luminous and transcendental, that reside in that nearby dimension of ecstatic beauty and understanding that we have denied until it is now nearly too late.

Inflict the least possible permanent injury, for the enemy of to-day is the customer of the morrow and the ally of the future

The passion for power over others can never cease to threaten mankind, and is always sure of finding new and unforseen allies in continuing its martyrology.

I considered her my ally, because, like me, she was imperfect.

We should be wary, particularly with our closest friends and allies, of breaking down the trust and confidence that lie at the foundation of relationships.

We must rely on our allies and foreign governments to share information and data to secure our country.