What a gulf between impression and expression! That’s our ironic fate—to have Shakespearean feelings and (unless by some billion-to-one chance we happen to be Shakespeare) to talk about them like automobile salesmen or teen-agers or college professors. We practice alchemy in reverse—touch gold and it turns into lead; touch the pure lyrics of experience, and they turn into the verbal equivalents of tripe and hogwash.

Culture is like the sum of special knowledge that accumulates in any large united family and is the common property of all its members. When we of the great Culture Family meet, we exchange reminiscences about Grandfather Homer, and that awful old Dr. Johnson, and Aunt Sappho, and poor Johnny Keats.

Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held.

I am I, and I wish I weren't.

The optimum population is modeled on the iceberg- eight-ninths below the water line, one-ninth above.

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know.

Sixty two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth. Idiots!