I think that once you've produced a conformist, a totally conformist society, a society in which there were no critics, that would in fact be an exact equivalent of the totalitarian societies against which we are supposed to be fighting in a cold war.

I wouldn't have said that Anthony Eden was equipped by nature to deal with the situation in the world today. I would have said that he was portentous, sincere, honest and rather stupid.

In politics, as in womanizing, failure is decisive. It sheds its retrospective gloom on earlier endeavor which at the time seemed full of promise.

One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we've developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.

For us humans, everything is permanent - until it changes, as we are immortal until we die

In the cycle of a great civilization, the artist begins as priest, and ends as a clown or buffoon.

The only ultimate disaster that can befall us is to feel ourselves at home on this earth.