Poetry is about as much a 'criticism of life' as red-hot iron is a criticism of fire.

Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.

The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.

This is no book. Whoever touches this touches a man.

Allow me to say that I would long since have committed suicide had desisting made me a professor of Latin.

A people that grows accustomed to sloppy writing is a people in the process of losing grip on its empire and on itself.

In case I conk out, this is provisionally what I have to do: I must clarify obscurities; I must make clearer definite ideas or dissociations. I must find a verbal formula to combat the rise of brutality--the principle of order versus the split atom.