Every social war is a battle between the very few on both sides who care and who fire their shots across a crowd of spectators.

It is not the least of a martyr's scourges to be canonized by the persons who burned him.

A political convention is just not a place where you come away with any trace of faith in human nature.

To say that an idea is fashionable is to say, I think, that is has been adulterated to a point where it is hardly an idea at all.

By adherence to a special set of rules, the child of the shabby-genteel can sometimes leap across the time which has passed by his family and function in the real world without doing violence to the hopes his mother held out for him. But those who cannot live within this pattern are the freaks and poets, and they travel a different road to peace.

There are things a man must not do even to save a nation.

The Communists offer one precious, fatal boon: they take away the sense of sin.