When some English moralists write about the importance of having character, they appear to mean only the importance of having a dull character.

We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one's life. But anyone who shrinks from that is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being.

Correctitude implies nowadays a formal or fastidious use of words; and what is wanted is not so much the correct as the living use of words. It is the memory of the meaning of a word which is the life of the word.

Nothing is certain by uncertainty.

America is the only country ever founded on a creed.

The old assumption of the approximate impossibility of war really rested on a similar assumption about the impossibility of evil-and especially of evil in high places.

The first two facts which a healthy boy or girl feels about sex are these: first that it is beautiful and then that it is dangerous.