“Human history in essence is the history of ideas.”

I had rather be called a journalist than an artist.

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.

The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.

Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race.

The uglier a man’s legs are, the better he plays golf – it’s almost a law.

The past is but the past of a beginning.

Leaders should lead as far as they can and then vanish. Their ashes should not choke the fire they have lit.

No passion in the world is equal to the passion to alter someone else’s draft.

I must confess that my imagination refuses to see any sort of submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and floundering at sea.

Heresies are experiments in man’s unsatisfied search for truth.

The only true measure of success is the ratio between what we might have done and what we might have been on the one hand, and the thing we have made and the things we have made of ourselves on the other.

If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.

I want to go ahead of Father Time with a scythe of my own.

The New Deal is plainly an attempt to achieve a working socialism and avert a social collapse in America; it is extraordinarily parallel to the successive ‘policies’ and ‘Plans’ of the Russian experiment. Americans shirk the word ‘socialism’, but what else can one call it?

Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State’s failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.

While there is a chance of the world getting through its troubles, I hold that a reasonable man has to behave as though he were sure of it. If at the end your cheerfulness in not justified, at any rate you will have been cheerful.

They don’t like the idea of having different points of view, so it was a battle.

Liberals are always proposing perfectly insane ideas, laws that will make everybody happy, laws that will make everything right, make us live forever, and all be rich. Conservatives are never that stupid.

Don’t have good ideas if you aren’t willing to be responsible for them.

Whatever it is that the government does, sensible Americans would prefer that the government does it to somebody else. This is the idea behind foreign policy.

Not since Ancient Greece have cities been thought of as the ideal living environment for humans. And that was so long ago it predates the invention of trousers.

The 20th century was a test bed for big ideas – fascism, communism, the atomic bomb.

I subscribe to the idea that personality is like a muscle.

Like the idea that every night might be the night before the world ends.