The soup, thin and dark and utterly savorless, tasted as if it had been drained out of the umbrella stand.

I was so embarrassed I could feel my nerves curling like bacon over a hot fire.

The English never smash in a face. They merely refrain from asking it to dinner.

Democracy makes many taxing demands on its practitioners, but suspension of the intelligence is not one of them.

We know of our own knowledge that we are human beings, and, as such, imperfect. But we are bathed by the communications industry in a ceaseless tide of inhuman, impossible perfection.

A society struggles to fulfill its best instincts, even as an individual does, and generally makes just as hard going of it. The fight against prejudice is an inevitable process. Man has been warring against his own lower nature ever since he found out he had one, and the battle against intolerance is part of the same old struggle between good and evil that has preoccupied us ever since we gave up swinging from trees.

... giving up alcohol or cigarettes is a lead-pipe cinch compared to the renunciation of complacence by a former (self-appointed) elite.