“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.”

Happiness is the only thing I understand.

When I was young, we thought that Oscar Wilde was a great nobleman who had thrown his life away for love. Nothing could be less true. He slept with East Enders who were procured for him by Lord Alfred Douglas.

Love is the extra effort we make in our dealings with those whom we do not like and once you understand that, you understand all. This idea that love overtakes you is nonsense. This is but a polite manifestation of sex. To love another you have to undertake some fragment of their destiny.

While I have very little to say in favor of sex (it’s vastly overrated, it’s frequently unnecessary, and it’s messy), it is greatly to be preferred to the interminable torments of romantic agony through which two people tear one another limb from limb while professing altruistic devotion.

It’s no good running a pig farm badly for 30 years while saying, ‘Really, I was meant to be a ballet dancer.’ By then, pigs will be your style.

I never spend my time doing anything I’ll have to do again tomorrow.

Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which it is possible to commit some social sin.

If you truly love me, kill the bartender.

I would have run all the way and I would have gone up to the largest and leatheriest of the denizens and said: If you truly love me, kill the bartender.

The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.

One should always be wary of anyone who promises that their love will last longer than a weekend.

Manners are a way of getting what you want without appearing to be an absolute swine.

The trouble with European cities is that they are drenched in their history, almost all of which is terrible.

My mother protected me from the world and my father threatened me with it.

Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked.

I don’t really act. I say the words the way I would say them if I meant them.

If a man must make himself appear cheerful; he must know why he is miserable.

It does not appear, nor is there any reason to believe that [ Jeff Sessions] will put policing reform front and center in the way that this justice department has.

I`m deeply concerned about Jeff Sessions, who has clearly expressed opposition to the use of consent decrees and has advanced a lot of this states` rights rhetoric.

I couldn’t think of anything less appealing than molding the minds of tomorrow’s leaders.

There’s an appeal to the American sense of exceptionalism, that we’re morally superior, as way to not be self-critical. I think that’s a bit dangerous.

People’s feelings are easily swayed. The things reflected in people’s eyes are full of deception. Nothing is as it appears.

One of the things I’ve really gotten past in the last couple of years is the idea of being made uncomfortable by the way things appear, rather than how things are.

They’re only there to wait for the men. To love them and be loved back or not — mostly not; to be beaten up or killed; to appear as a face on the wall of Meurseault’s cell.