Quoting, like smoking, is a dirty habit to which I am devoted.

Thinking about profound social change, conservatives always expect disaster, while revolutionaries confidently anticipate utopia. Both are wrong.

People who are genuinely involved in life, not just living a routine they've contrived to protect them from disaster, always seem to have more demanded of them than they can easily take on.

Cynic' is the sentimentalist's name for the realist.

One hires lawyers as on hires plumbers, because one wants to keep one's hands off the beastly drains.

Is there any vanity greater than the vanity of those who believe themselves without it?

Once you are thought selfish, not only are you forgiven a life designed mainly to suit yourself, which in anyone else would appear monstrous, but if an impulse to generosity should by chance overpower you, you will get five times the credit of some poor selfless soul who has been oozing kindness for years.