Home life is no more natural to us than a cage is natural to a cockatoo.

What is wrong with priests and popes is that instead of being apostles and saints, they are nothing but empirics who say I know instead of I am learning, and pray for credulity and inertia as wise men pray for skepticism and activity.

Until the men of action clear out the talkers we who have social consciences are at the mercy of those who have none.

The writer who aims at producing the platitudes which are "not for an age, but for all time" has his reward in being unreadable inall ages.... The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only sort of man who writes about all people and about all time.

But whether the risks to which liberty exposes us are moral or physical our right to liberty involves the right to run them. A man who is not free to risk his neck as an aviator or his soul as a heretic is not free at all; and the right to liberty begins, not at the age of 21 years but 21 seconds.

Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability.

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.