“Sailors ought never to go to church. They ought to go to hell, where it is much more comfortable.”

Beauty is in the heart of the beholder.

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 country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy the Church. America Hollywood.

Your body is the church where Nature asks to be reverenced.

The Almighty can hardly be such a fool as the churches make out.

An it isn’t so much that the church is in bondage to Big Business and doctrines as laid down by millionaires – though a lot of churches are that, too.

My father considered a walk among the mountains as the equivalent of churchgoing.

Not Churchill. Sixty-five, old for a Churchill.

But look what the Church has done to Jesus during the last two thousand years. What they have made of Him. How they have turned every word He spoke for their own vile ends. Jesus would be framed and in jail if he was living today.

My objection to the church isn’t that the preachers are cruel, hypocritical, actually wicked, though some of them are that, too .