Were it possible for us to wait for ourselves to come into the room, not many of us would find our hearts breaking into flower as we heard the door handle turn.

Once a secret society establishes itself within an open society, there is no end to the hideous mistrust it must cause.

There is nothing more frightening than the faces of people whom one does not know but who seem to know one, and be amused by one.

Whatever happens, never forget that people would rather be led to perdition by a man, than to victory by a woman.

A great many quite good plays could be performed with rhythmic howls in the place of dialogue and lose almost nothing by the change.

The [nineteenth-century] young men who were Puritans in politics were anti-Puritans in literature. They were willing to die for the independence of Poland or the Manchester Fenians; and they relaxed their tension by voluptuous reading in Swinburne.

I had come to Yugoslavia to see what history meant in flesh and blood.