On a very rough-and-ready basis we might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having determined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others. An eccentric puts ice cream on steak simply because he likes it; should a crank do so, he would endow the act with moral grandeur and straightaway denounce as sinners (or reactionaries) all who failed to follow suit. Cranks, at their most familiar, are a sort of peevish prophets, and it's not enough that they should be in the right; others must also be in the wrong.

Old age is an excellent time for outrage. My goal is to say or do at least one outrageous thing every week.

He was the mightiest of Puritans no less than of philistines who first insisted that beauty is only skin deep.

One of the saddest things about conformity is the ghastly sort of non-conformity it breeds; the noisy protesting, the aggressive rebelliousness, the rigid counter-fetishism.

Life for most of us is full of steep stairs to go up and later, shaky stairs to totter down; and very early in the history of stairs must have come the invention of bannisters.

Nothing so soothes our vanity as a display of greater vanity in others; it makes us vain, in fact, of our modesty.

For tens of millions of people [television] has become habit-forming, brain-softening, taste-degrading.