“However low a man sinks he never reaches the level of the police.”

You don’t have to deal with anyone in America. They accept you the way you are.

People are not heterosexual or homosexual, just sexual.

When I told the people of Northern Ireland that I was an atheist, a woman in the audience stood up and said, ‘Yes, but is it the God of the Catholics or the God of the Protestants in whom you don’t believe?’

I recommend limiting one’s involvement in other people’s lives to a pleasantly scant minimum. This may seem too stoical a position in these madly passionate times, but madly passionate people rarely make good on their madly passionate promises.

Life was a funny thing that happened to me on the way to the grave.

The … problem that confronts homosexuals is that they set out to win the love of a “real” man. If they succeed, they fail. A man who “goes with” other men is not what they would call a real man. The conundrum is incapable of resolution, but that does not make homosexuals give it up.

I don’t like peas, and I’m glad I don’t like them, because if I liked them I would eat them and I hate them.

He knew them only ‘in Braille’ – the curtains were never drawn back in the rooms in Oxford where he met those boys. It was the most sordid life you can imagine. And he was bleating about love and dragging the fair name of Mr. Plato into the trial – after a life like that?

The consuming desire of most human beings is deliberately to plant their whole life in the hands of some other person. I would describe this method of searching for happiness as immature. Development of character consists solely in moving toward self-sufficiency.

Politics are not an instrument for effecting social change; they are the art of making the inevitable appear to be a matter of wise human choice.

If you describe things as better than they are, you are considered to be a romantic; if you describe things as worse than they are, you will be called a realist; and if you describe things exactly as they are, you will be thought of as a satirist.

It’s a strange situation, but people will pay your fare to get you to go and tell them how to be happy.

You can’t be a person and a lady. If you’re a person, you can open the damned door yourself.

I never saw Portsmouth by day.

The curiosity of the neighbors about you, is a tribute to your individuality, and you should encourage it

Our clothes are too much a part of us for most of us ever to be entirely indifferent to their condition: it is as though the fabric were indeed a natural extension of the body, or even of the soul.