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

It is the gossip columnist's business to write about what is none of his business.

In the history of thought and culture the dark nights have perhaps in some ways cost mankind less grief than the false dawns, the prison houses in which hope persists less grief than the promised lands where hope expires.

Nominally a great age of scientific inquiry, ours has become an age of superstition about the infallibility of science; of almost mystical faith in its non-mystical methods; above all-which perhaps most explains the expert's sovereignty-of external verities; of traffic-cop morality and rabbit-test truth.

The closer and more confidential our relationship with someone, the less we are entitled to ask about what we are not voluntarily told.

One must never judge the writer by the man; but one may fairly judge the man by the writer.

Ours is not so much an age of vulgarity as of vulgarization; everything is tampered with or touched up, or adulterated or watered down, in an effort to make it palatable, in an effort to make it pay.