If you demand my authorities for this and that, I must reply that only those who have never hunted up the authorities as I have believe that there is any authority who is not contradicted flatly by some other authority.

It seems as though every time you learn something new you have to give up something.

The quality of a play is the quality of its ideas.

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means.

In literature the ambition of the novice is to acquire the literary language; the struggle of the adept is to get rid of it.

During the last considerable epidemic at the turn of the century, I was a member of the Health Committee of London Borough Council, and I learned how the credit of vaccination is kept up statistically by diagnosing all the revaccinated cases (of smallpox) as pustular eczema, varioloid or what not---except smallpox.

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