“A man will lay down his life for his friend but will not sacrifice his eardrums.”

The most important thing in an argument, next to being right, is to leave an escape hatch for your opponent, so that he can gracefully swing over to your side without too much apparent loss of face.

We may hate a person because he reminds us of someone we feared and disliked when younger; or because we see in him some gross caricature of what we find repugnant in ourself; or because he symbolizes an attitude that seems to threaten us.

Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.

Love makes everything lovely; hate concentrates itself on the object of its hatred.

Any philosophy that can be put in a nutshell belongs there.

A university is not, primarily, a place in which to learn how to make a living; it is a place in which to learn how to be more fully a human being, how to draw upon one’s resources, how to discipline the mind and expand the imagination; how to make some sense out of the big world we will shortly be thrown into.

The chip-pan fire was by far the most popular method these Proddies had for burning their houses down.

As long as it doesn’t veer away from who I am, I’m down with it.

Adolf Hitler may have been wrong all down the line, but one thing is beyond dispute: the man was able to work his way up from lance corporal in the German Army to Führer of a people of almost 80 million. His success alone proved that I should subordinate myself to this man.

It was the first work of art. A horizontal stroke: the woman lying down.

I settled down in the full persuasion, that the immersion of a professing believer in Christ is the only Christian baptism.

She had somehow fallen down the steps of the Village Vanguard, which still exists today.

The difference between screwing around and science is writing it down.

I built you a sandcastle because you’re a princess, but I tore it down because I’m a loser.