The trouble with Communism is the Communists, just as the trouble with Christianity is the Christians.

The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself.

A bad artist almost always tries to conceal his incompetence by whooping up a new formula.

The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth.

It seems to me that you are better off, as a writer and as an American, in a small town than you'd be in New York. I thoroughly detest New York, though I have to go there very often.... Have you ever noticed that no American writer of any consequence lives in Manhattan? Dreiser tried it (after many years in the Bronx), but finally moved to California.

War may make a fool of man, but it by no means degrades him; on the contrary, it tends to exalt him, and its net effects are much like those of motherhood on women.

Science is unflinchingly deterministic, and it has begun to force its determinism into morals. On some shining tomorrow a psychoanalyst may be put into the box to prove that perjury is simply a compulsion neurosis, like beating time with the foot at a concert or counting the lampposts along the highway.