If only the sense of actuality can be lulled-and it sleeps for ever in most historians-there is no passion that cannot be gratified in the past.

The work of art assumes the existence of the perfect spectator, and is indifferent to the fact that no such person exists.

At times our need for a sympathetic gesture is so great that we care not what exactly it signifies or how much we may have to pay for it afterwards.

Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.

I don't know what to think until I see what I've said.

We are willing enough to praise freedom when she is safely tucked away in the past and cannot be a nuisance. In the present, amidst dangers whose outcome we cannot foresee, we get nervous about her, and admit censorship.

There is an aristocracy of the sensitive. They represent the true human tradition of permanent victory over cruelty and chaos.