“On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.”

I love America, but I don’t like it.

Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.

He loved the people just as much as he feared and detested persons.

So much in a revolution is nothing but waiting.

Love is the one thing that can really sure-enough lighten all of life’s dark clouds.

We’re tired of hearing politicians and priests and cautious reformers… coax us, ‘Be calm! Be patient! Wait!

Is it possible that nobody has ever known that there never has been a completely civilized man, and won’t be for another thousand years?

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

We’d get sick on too many cookies, but ever so much sicker on no cookies at all.

The world and all its wisdom is but a booby, blundering school-boy that needs management and could be managed.

Why is it that traveling Americans are always so dreadful?

To be ‘intellectual’ or ‘artistic’ or, in their own word, to be ‘highbrow,’ is to be priggish and of dubious virtue.

A man takes a drink, the drink takes another, and the drink takes the man.

Most of us who work — or want to work — will always have trouble or discontent. So we must learn to be calm, and train all our faculties, and make others happy.

My chief objection is that 99% of sermons and Sunday School teachings are so agonizingly dull.

To a true-blue professor of literature in an American university, literature is not something that a plain human being, living today, painfully sits down to produce. No; it is something dead.

Everyone thinks the Chinese government selected me. Never ever. I was selected by Herzog and de Meuron.

Has it ever occurred to you that you are seeking God with His eyes?

You can put city polish on a man, but by golly, it seems you can’t ever rub it off him.

Have you ever heard apple wood talking? It’s the most loquacious of all. You really can’t get a word in edgeways.

Every ruler must remember three things. Firstly, that he rules man; secondly, that he rules according to law, and thirdly, that he does not rule for ever.

I wouldn’t trust the best fifteen minutes I ever lived to get me into heaven.

I don’t feel I ever played the victim, although I was always in jeopardy.

Looking back, now, I realize that you only ever need one person who lights up that way when you enter a room.