Life is given us as a passion.

Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.

Tennis belongs to the individualistic past - a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.

Grab a pen and put down some words - your name even - and a title: something to see, to revise, to carve, to do over in the opposite way

The nation in arms is virtually a communist state: the people must be paid wages and fed and protected and regimented behind the lines as much as on the front. Minds must be kept loyal and at the right pitch of hate, so that successive drafts of fighters are accepted without murmurings. Letters and newspapers must be censored while the propaganda mill grinds on. As for decisions of strategy and overall command, they must please many masters: dissenters in the cabinet, the heads of the allied states and public opinion. Hence failures must be disguised or concealed.

Writing, at least a craft and at its best an art, aspiring to the unique, is the most difficult to learn.

Machines are admirable and tyrannize only with the user's consent. Where, then, is the enemy? Not where the machine gives relief from drudgery but where human judgment abdicates. The smoothest machine-made product of the age is the organization man, for even the best organizing principle tends to corrupt, and the mechanical principle corrupts absolutely.