“The crisis of today is the joke of tomorrow.”

Cynicism is humor in ill health.

What really matters is what you do with what you have.

Nothing leads so straight to futility as literary ambitions without systematic knowledge.

We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century.

Moral indignation is jealousy with a halo.

Some people bear three kinds of trouble – the ones they’ve had, the ones they have, and the ones they expect to have.

In England we have come to rely upon a comfortable time-lag of fifty years or a century intervening between the perception that something ought to be done and a serious attempt to do it.

One of the darkest evils of our world is surely the unteachable wildness of the Good.

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.

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

A marriage without conflicts is almost as inconceivable as a nation without crises.

If we have moved back to a regime of regular financial crises – like the one we had from the 1870s to the 1930s.

The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the Second World War.

We will have more crises and none of them will look like this because no two crises have anything in common except human nature.

Its operation in a world beset by fuel and energy crises makes no sense at all.

The majority of people perform well in a crisis and when the spotlight is on them; it’s on the Sunday afternoons of this life, when nobody is looking, that the spirit falters.

Hence, blessed are the two cries people abominate most: Death and poverty.

The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who, in times of great moral crisis, maintain their neutrality.