You must always believe that life is as extraordinary as music says it is.

Mozart eliminates the idea of haste from life. His airs could not lag as they make their journey through the listener's attention; they are not the right shape for loitering. But it is as true that they never rush, they are never headlong or helter-skelter, they splash no mud, they raise no dust.

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.

Why must you always try to be omnipotent, and shove things about? Tragic things happen sometimes that we just have to submit to.

Women know the damnation of charity because the habit of civilization has always been to throw them cheap alms rather than give them good wages.

Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.

If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.'