Whenever you remove any fence, always pause long enough to ask why it was put there in the first place.

It is often a mistake to combine two pleasures, because pleasures, like pains, can act as counter-irri-tants to each other.

The great misfortune of the modern English is not at all that they are more boastful than other people (they are not); it is that they are boastful about those particular things which nobody can boast of without losing them.

The worst moment for an atheist is when he feels a profound sense of gratitude and has no one to thank.

The lunatic is the man who lives in a small world but thinks it is a large one; he is the man who lives in a tenth of the truth, and thinks it is the whole. The madman cannot conceive any cosmos outside a certain tale or conspiracy or vision.

In real life the people who are most bigoted are the people who have no convictions at all.

What life and death may be to a turkey is not my business; but the soul of Scrooge and the body of Cratchit are my business.