... when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about, you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precious curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by their information?

It is not permissible to lie merely to save one's face. But it is sometimes permissible to lie to save another person's face.

What passes for an original opinion is, generally, merely an original phrase. Old lamps for new - yes; but it is always the same oil in the lamp.

Originality usually amounts only to plagiarizing something unfamiliar.

I have looked warily at anthropologists ever since the day when I went to hear a great Greek scholar lecture on the Iliad, and listened for an hour to talk about bull-roarers and leopard-societies.

No convention gets to be a convention at all except by grace of a lot of clever and powerful people first inventing it, and then imposing it on others. You can be pretty sure, if you are strictly conventional, that you are following genius--a long way off. And unless you are a genius yourself, that is a good thing to do.

men demand everything and are not satisfied until sex blinds them into thinking they have got it.