People are the common denominator of progress; no improvement is possible with unimproved people.

Humor is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention, but it has no persuasive value at all.

The oldest [John Kenneth] Galbraith rule is that when you hear that a new era has dawned, you should take cover.

Had the Bible been in clear straightforward language, had the ambiguities and contradictions been edited out, and had the language been constantly modernised to accord with contemporary taste it would almost certainly have been, or become, a work of lesser influence.

Of late I have searched diligently to discover the advantages of age, and there is, I have concluded, only one. It is that lovely women treat your approaches with understanding rather than with disdain.

When everything else failed, we can still become immortal by making an enormous blunder.

Washington is a place where men praise courage and act on elaborate personal cost-benefit calculations.