God forbid that any book should be banned. The practice is as indefensible as infanticide.

Sex, which ought to be an incident of life, is the obsession of the well-fed world.

I see the main problem of my life, and indeed anybody's life, as the balancing of competitive freedoms ... a sense of mutual obligations that have to be honored, and a legal system which can be trusted to step in when that sense fails.

I don't believe that to understand is necessarily to pardon, but I feel that to understand makes one forget that one cannot pardon.

I wonder if we are all wrong about each other, if we are just composing unwritten novels about the people we meet?

one of Mr. [Thomas] Hardy's ancestors must have married a weeping willow. There are pages and pages in his collected poems which are simply plain narratives in ballad form of how an unenjoyable time was had by all.

Now different races and nationalities cherish different ideals of society that stink in each other's nostrils with an offensiveness beyond the power of any but the most monstrous private deed.