“It is a curious thing. That every creed promises a paradise which will be absolutely uninhabitable for anyone of civilized taste.”

Anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen paper, and no telephone or wife.

Mr. Wodehouse’s idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.

The only thing that it is advisable to know in any language is the numerals; and even there, you can do a lot with the fingers.

They are a very decent generous lot of people out here and they don’t expect you to listen. It’s the secret of social ease in this country. They talk entirely for their own pleasure. Nothing they say is designed to be heard.

I’m one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation.

Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.

Its a rather pleasant change when all your life you’ve had people looking after you, to have someone to look after yourself. Only of course it has to be someone pretty hopeless to need looking after by me.

I think it’s one of the kindest things you can do to the very wicked, to give them time to repent.

Her heart was broken perhaps, but it was a small inexpensive organ of local manufacture. In a wider and grander way she felt things had been simplified.

I think there’s almost nothing I can’t excuse except perhaps worshiping graven images. That seems to be idiotic.

He had no strength for any other war than his own solitary struggle to keep alive.

Sometimes, I feel the past and the future pressing so hard on either side that there’s no room for the present at all.

Of the many smells of Athens two seem to me the most characteristic – that of garlic, bold and deadly like acetylene gas. and that of dust, soft and warm and caressing like tweed.

After all, damn it, what does being in love mean if you can’t trust a person.

Where can we hide in fair weather, we orphans of the storm?

Your actions, and your action alone, determines your worth.

Where is everybody? Humans could theoretically colonize the galaxy in a million years or so, and if they could, astronauts from older civilizations could do the same. So why haven’t they come to Earth?

Man’s great power of thinking, remembering, and communicating are responsible for the evolution of civilization.

It is no longer possible to accept the benefits of civilization and at the same time deny the supernatural basis upon which it is based.

Perhaps my dynamite plants will put an end to war sooner than your [pacifist] congresses. On the day two army corps can annihilate each other in one second all civilized nations will recoil from war in horror.

A civilization which has taken over the world cannot be said to be dying.

A decent provision for the poor is the true test of civilization.

After I was discharged from the military, it was difficult trying to become a civilian.

Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old.