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

There’s nothing wrong in suffering, if you suffer for a purpose. Our revolution didn’t abolish danger or death. It simply made danger and death worthwhile.

In politics, strangely enough, the best way to play your cards is to lay them face upwards on the table.

There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in embankments and railways and iron bridges and engineering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is the measure of imperfection.

We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century – for several centuries.

It is not reasonable that those who gamble with men’s lives should not pay with their own.

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 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.

Human history in essence is the history of ideas.

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.

So the understructure should be underrated, but strong enough to hold the earth.

Anything important has to be almost invisible. And underrated.

I believe the preservation of the home in the future lies almost entirely in the hands of men.

Tolstoi’s scripts are almost indecipherable.

Alan Moore’s writing is almost novelistic. It’s very intricate and wordy and smart.

To be almost saved is to be totally lost.

You know them so well, almost as well or better than their spouse. You have to know them, warts and all.

Not all love lives forever. But is it not love still? The maybe and the almost. And the love that never will.