“I had rather be called a journalist than an artist.”

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.

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.

I dont think I ever wanted to be a journalist – I was more interested in what comes from being a journalist.

I can’t remember a single occasion when I have been kind to a journalist.

Journalists love to show their compassion.

Start with local press first. Start with people you know. Don’t pitch every journalist.

So, here you are, especially in the Pentagon. Some guy tells you something. He says that’s a national security matter. Well, you’re supposed to tremble and get scared and it never, almost never means the security of the national government.

The whole ‘grunge-girl’ comparisons certainly are the easiest to pick out, and I appreciate that music journalists are rushed.

It’s silly to say that with a journalist, but sometimes there is not a truth to be found.

My dad was very successful as a journalist, so I didn’t want to be one. I wanted to be a novelist.