Not to understand the doer is to have no certain knowledge of what has been done, or why it was undertaken

Material blessings, when they pay beyond the category of need, are weirdly fruitful of headache.

Our history is every human history; a black and gory business, with more scoundrels than wise men at the lead, and more louts than both put together to cheer and follow.

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.

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

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.

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)