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

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.

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 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.

Oh my only friend, my best beloved, the gates are open in my house – do not pass by like a dream.

We must make the best of those ills which cannot be avoided.

The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed.

Decades ago, George Orwell suggested that the best one-word description of a Fascist was bully.

The best thing to do is go as far out as you can get… what you regard as ‘too far’-and when others follow, as they will, move on.

My fans are the best. I mean if there was a war, I think they’d definitely win just because they’d kill them with kindness.

To not move around, observe, and analyze, in order to make the best decisions possible, was to fail as a leader and fail the team.

The best friend on earth of man is the tree: When we use the tree respectfully and economically, we have one of the greatest resources of the earth.