I would look at the first chapter of any new novel as a final test of its merits. If there was a murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I read the story. If there was no murdered man under the sofa in the first chapter, I dismissed the story as tea-table twaddle, which it often really was.

I am a journalist and have no earthly motives except curiosity and personal vanity.

By experts in poverty I do not mean sociologists, but poor men.

War is not the best way of settling differences; it is the only way of preventing their being settled for you.

Whether a man chooses to tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes is a problem analogous to whether he chooses to tell the truth in French or in German.

When you break the big laws, you do not get liberty; you do not even get anarchy. You get the small laws.

And it did for one wild moment cross my mind that, perhaps, those might not be the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who, by their own account, had neither one nor the other.