Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, "I will not hit you if you do not hit me"; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, "We must not hit each other in the holy place.

...the primary paradox that man is superior to all the things around him and yet is at their mercy.

The eagle has no liberty; he only has loneliness.

You cannot grow a beard in a moment of passion.

For Tommy, on that hot and empty afternoon, was in a state of mind in which grown-up people go away and write books about their whole world, and stories about what it is like to be married, and plays about the important problems of modern times. Tommy, being only ten years old, was not able to do harm on this large and handsome scale.

Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason...that is its reason for existing.

Atheism is indeed the most daring of all dogmas . . . for it is the assertion of a universal negative.