To make a deliberate falsification for personal gain is the last, worst depth to which either scholar or artist can descend in work or life.

If people will bring dynamite into a powder factory, they must expect explosions.

Britain possesses no climate, only weather.

The ideal of a perfectly functioning democracy is one person, one vote; the ideal of a perfectly functioning market is one dollar, one vote.It's a hoary superstition that democratically elected governments invariably function as instruments of the collective will.A society in which consumption has to be artificially stimulated in order to keep production going is a society founded on trash and waste.

The Devil is a spiritual lunatic, but, like many lunatics, he is extremely plausible and cunning.

To make a precise scientific description of reality out of words is like trying to build a rigid structure out of pure quicksilver.

Fantasy works inwards upon its author, blurring the boundary between the visioned and the actual, and associating itself ever moreclosely with the Ego, so that the child who has fantasied himself a murderer ends by becoming a Loeb or a Leopold. The creative Imagination works outwards, steadily increasing the gap between the visioned and the actual, till this becomes the great gulf fixed between art and nature. Few writers of crime-stories become murderers--if any do, it is not the result of identifying themselves with their murderous heroes.