If you know what a man's doing, get in front of him; but if you want to guess what he's doing keep behind him.

There are no new lies, no new heresies. Man is simply not that creative.

There is only one thing that it requires real courage to say, and that is a truism.

The coming peril is the intellectual, educational, psychological and artistic overproduction, which, equally with economic overproduction, threatens the well-being of contemporary civilisation. People are inundated, blinded, deafened, and mentally paralysed by a flood of vulgar and tasteless externals, leaving them no time for leisure, thought, or creation from within themselves.

The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted; precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.

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

The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have always objected to being governed at all.