The prophesying business is like writing fugues; it is fatal to every one save the man of absolute genius.

The federal [bank deposit] insurance scheme has worked up to now simply and solely because there have been very few bank failures. The next time we have a pestilence of them it will come to grief quickly enough, and if the good banks escape ruin with the bad ones it will be only because the taxpayer foots the bill.

Every failure teaches a man something, to wit, that he will probably fail again.

All successful newspapers are ceaselessly querulous and bellicose. They never defend anyone or anything if they can help it; if the job is forced on them, they tackle it by denouncing someone or something else.

In any combat between a rogue and a fool the sympathy of mankind is always with the rogue.

It is almost as safe to assume that an artist of any dignity is against his country, i.e., against the environment in which God hath placed him, as it is to assume that his country is against the artist.

The best years are the forties; after fifty a man begins to deteriorate, but in the forties he is at the maximum of his villainy.