A man cannot deserve adventures; he cannot earn dragons and hippogriffs.

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

The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them.

There is a law written in the darkest of the Books of Life, and it is this: If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in frightful danger of seeing it for the first time.

Like every book I never wrote, it is by far the best book I have ever written.

For good or evil, a line has been passed in our political history; and something that we have known all our lives is dead. I will take only one example of it: our politicians can no longer be caricatured.

By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.