The novelist now usurps the chair of the educator, the pulpit of the preacher, the columns of the journalist. Yet his original purpose of entertaining may have been his highest purpose. (introduction to Gladiator, Book League Monthly, 1930)

I don't like people--much. This kind, I mean. And they don't like me at all, as a rule. Maybe the latter explains the former.

Common man has at long last got himself so far out of gear with nature and his environment that he is beginning to see the shape of extinction, whether he recognizes it as such or not.

If liberty has any meaning it means freedom to improve.

There is no advance without strife.

Ignorance is not bliss — it is oblivion. Determined ignorance is the hastiest kind of oblivion.

Man's destiny lies half within himself, half without. To advance in either half at the expense of the other is literally insane.