An animal may be ferocious and cunning enough, but it takes a real man to tell a lie.

There was a time when I believed in the story and the scheme of salvation, so far as I could understand it, just as I believed there was a Devil... Suddenly the light broke through to me and I knew this God was a lie... For indeed it is a silly story, and each generation nowadays swallows it with greater difficulty... Why do people go on pretending about this Christianity?

The Anglo-Saxon genius for parliamentary government asserted itself; there was a great deal of talk and no decisive action.

An artist who theorizes about his work is no longer artist but critic.

I doubt if these two fine, active minds [President and Mrs. Roosevelt] have ever inquiried how it is they know what they know and think as they do. Nor have they ever thought of what they might have been if they had grown up in an entirely different culture. They have the disposition of all politicians world over to deal only with made opinion. They have never inquired how it is that opinion is made.

You are trying to do a more difficult thing than record folk songs; you are trying to record life.

The future is the shape of things to come.