The essence of science is that it is always willing to abandon a given idea for a better one; the essence of theology is that it holds its truths to be eternal and immutable.

At eight or nine, I suppose intelligence is no more than a small spot of light on the floor of a large and murky room.

The theatre, when all is said and done, is not life in miniature, but life enormously magnified, life hideously exaggerated.

The Old Testament, as everyone who has looked into it is aware, drips with blood; there is, indeed, no more bloody chronicle in all the literature of the world.

Politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance.

All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them.

To believe that Russia has got rid of the evils of capitalism takes a special kind of mind. It is the same kind of mind that believes that a Holy Roller has got rid of sin.