Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster.

Vulgarity is the garlic in the salad of charm.

There is no hate without fear. Hate is crystallized fear, fear's dividend, fear objectivized. We hate what we fear and so where hate is, fear is lurking. Thus we hate what threatens our person, our liberty, our privacy, our income, our popularity, our vanity and our dreams and plans for ourselves. If we can isolate this element in what we hate we may be able to cease from hating... Hate is the consequence of fear; we fear something before we hate; a child who fears noises becomes the man who hates them.

There cannot be a personal God without a pessimistic religion. As soon as there is a personal God he is a disappointing God.

A life based on reason will always require to be balanced by an occasional bout of violent and irrational emotion, for instinctual drives must be satisfied

Two weeks before his death, a friend asked him half jokingly if he had discovered any meaning in life. "Yes," he replied, "there is a meaning; at least, for me, there is one thing that matters - to set a chime of words tinkling in the minds of a few fastidious people."

Slums may well be breeding grounds of crime, but middle class suburbs are incubators of apathy and delirium.