I really don't want to encourage young writers. Keep them down and out and silent is my motto.

Government is either organized benevolence or organized madness; its peculiar magnitude permits no shading.

The essence of government is concern for the widest possible public interest; the essence of the humanities, it seems to me, is private study, thought, and passion. Publicity is a essential to the one as privacy is to the other.

There's a crystallization that goes on in a poem which the young man can bring off, but which the middle-aged man can't.

Adversity in immunological doses has its uses; more than that crushes.

Faith is not so much a binary pole as a quantum state, which tends to indeterminacy when closely examined.

There is no pleasing New Englanders, my dear, their soil is all rocks and their hearts are bloodless absolutes.