For they have nothing to fight me with, save the brute force of their numbers. I have my mind.

Ah, there's nothing like tea in the afternoon. When the British Empire collapses, historians will find that it had made but two invaluable contributions to civilization - this tea ritual and the detective novel.

To fear to face an issue is to believe that the worst is true.

Genius is an exaggeration of dimension. So is elephantiasis. Both may be only a disease.

If you tell an ugly woman that she is beautiful, you offer her the great homage of corrupting the concept of beauty.

It is too early to feel fear of the future when one is under 30, and too late after that. What I mean is that one must never allow fear to become one's permanent sense of life. The important thing is to prepare yourself intellectually to deal with whatever circumstances you may encounter, which requires that you define your values fully, clearly and rationally -- and never betray them.

But the mind is an attribute of the individual. There is no such thing as a collective brain. There is no such thing as a collective thought. An agreement reached by a group of men is only a compromise or an average drawn upon many individual thoughts.