We must not stay as we are, doing always what was done last time, or we shall stick in the mud. Yet neither must we undertake a new world as catastrophic Utopians, and wreck our civilization in our hurry to mend it.

You propound a complicated arithmetical problem: say cubing a number containing four digits. Give me a slate and half an hour's time, and I can produce a wrong answer.

If the wicked flourish and the fittest survive, Nature must be the god of rascals.

The notion that the colonel need be a better man than the private is as confused as the notion that the keystone need be stronger than the coping stone.

It is not the number of years we have behind us, but the number we have before us, that makes us careful and responsible and determined to find out the truth about everything.

A pessimist is a man who thinks everybody is as nasty as himself, and hates them for it.

I hope you have lost your good looks, for while they last any fool can adore you, and the adoration of fools is bad for the soul. No, give me a ruined complexion and a lost figure and sixteen chins on a farmyard of Crow's feet and an obvious wig. Then you shall see me coming out strong.