... it matters not what natural endowment a race may have if it prostitutes itself to the service of death.

It isn't only living people who die, it is great stretches of living, which can die even when the people who lived there still exist.

International relationships are preordained to be clumsy gestures based on imperfect knowledge.

No one can write a best-seller by taking thought. The slightest touch of insincerity blurs its appeal. The writer who keeps his tongue in his cheek, who knows that he is writing for fools and that, therefore, he had better write like a fool, makes a respectable living out of serials and novelettes; but he will never make the vast, the blaring, half a million success. That comes of blended sincerity and vitality.

It appears that even the different parts of the same person do not converse among themselves, do not succeed in learning from each other what are their desires and their intentions.

The French use cooking as a means of self-expression, and this meal perfectly represented the personality of a cook who had spent the morning resting her unwashed chin on the edge of a tureen, pondering whether she should end her life immediately by plunging her head into her abominable soup.

Idiocy is the female defect ... It is no worse than the male defect, which is lunacy.