“A civilized man is one who will give a serious answer to a serious question. Civilization itself is a certain sane balance of values.”

Humanity is the rich effluvium, it is the waste and the manure and the soil, and from it grows the tree of the arts.

Good art however ‘immoral’ is wholly a thing of virtue. Good art can NOT be immoral. By good art I mean art that bears true witness, I mean the art that is most precise.

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.

I would hold the rosy, slender fingers of the dawn for you.

Any damn fool can be spontaneous.

Wars in old times were made to get slaves. The modern implement of imposing slavery is debt.

Seems fairly clear that you fix a breed by LIMITING the amount of alien infiltration. You make a race by homogeneity and by avoiding in breeding, No argument has ever been sprouted against it. You like it in dogs and horses.

USURY is the cancer of the world, which only the surgeon’s knife of Fascism can cut out of the life of the nations.

When words cease to cling close to things, kingdoms fall, empires wane and diminish.

The sum of human wisdom is not contained in any one language, and no single language is capable of expressing all forms and degrees of human comprehension.

No man understands a deep book until he has seen and lived at least part of its contents.

To break the pentameter, that was the first heaven.

There is no reason why the same man should like the same books at eighteen and at forty-eight.

The worst mistake I made was that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism.

A man’s hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.

Why fight for a flag when you can buy one for a nickel.