Marxism: The theory that all the important things in history are rooted in an economic motive, that history is a science, a science of the search for food.

Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods.

Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all. And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.

Thrift is poetic because it is creative; waste is unpoetic because it is waste.

Poets do not go mad, but chess players do.

An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old.

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