You can be a thorough-going Neo-Darwinian without imagination, metaphysics, poetry, conscience, or decency. For 'Natural Selection' has no moral significance: it deals with that part of evolution which has no purpose, no intelligence, and might more appropriately be called accidental selection, or better still, Unnatural Selection, since nothing is more unnatural than an accident. If it could be proved that the whole universe had been produced by such Selection, only fools and rascals could bear to live.

The sex illusion is not a fixed quantity: not what mathematicians call a constant. It varies from zero in my wife's case to madness in that of our stepsister.

No severity of punishment deters when detection is uncertain, as it always must be.

If only for a half hour a day, a child should do something serviceable to the community

The technical history of modern harmony is a history of growth of toleration by the human ear of chords that at first sounded discordant and senseless to the main body of contemporary professional musicians.

I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self.

Don't waste time collecting other people's autographs; rather devote it to making your own autograph worth collecting.