When this immediate evil power has been defeated, we shall not yet have won the long battle with the elemental barbarities. Another Hitler, it may be an invisible adversary, will attempt, again, and yet again, to destroy our frail civilization. Is it true, I wonder, that the only way to escape a war is to be in it? When one is a part of an actuality does the imagination find a release?

The hardest thing to believe when you're young is that people will fight to stay in a rut, but not to get out of one.

The transcendental point of view, the habit of thought bred by communion with earth and sky, had refined the grain while it had roughened the husk.

... in the nineteen-thirties ... the most casual reader of murder mysteries could infallibly detect the villain, as soon as there entered a character who had recently washed his neck and did not commit mayhem on the English language.

To a thrifty theologian, bent on redemption with economy, there are few points of ethics too fine-spun for splitting.

it is wiser to be conventionally immoral than unconventionally moral. It isn't the immorality they object to, but the originality.

It is easy to convince a man who already thinks as you do.