Censorship ends in logical completeness when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody can read.

You are all alike, you respectable people. You can't tell me the bursting strain of a ten-inch gun, which is a very simple matter;but you all think you can tell me the bursting strain of a man under temptation. You daren't handle high explosives; but you're all ready to handle honesty and truth and justice and the whole duty of man, and kill one another at that game. What a country! What a world!

The conversion of a savage to Christianity is the conversion of Christianity to savagery.

Great art is never produced for its own sake. It is too difficult to be worth the effort.

The notion that inspiration is something that happened thousands of years ago, and was then finished and done with. . . the theory that God retired from business at that period and has not been heard from since, is as silly as it is blasphemous.

Women upset everything. When you let them into your life, you find that the woman is driving at one thing and you're driving at another.

Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny; they have only shifted it to another shoulder.