The old prose writers wrote as if they were speaking to an audience; while, among us, prose is invariably written for the eye alone.

I think there ought to be a club in which preachers and journalists could come together and have the sentimentalism of the one matched with the cynicism of the other. That ought to bring them pretty close to the truth.

Our dreams of a pure virtue are dissolved in a situation in which it is possible to exercise the virtue of responsibility toward a community of nations only by courting the prospective guilt of the atomic bomb.

That's why history is not an answer to our problem, because history complicates, enlarges every problem of human existence. Now, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries didn't believe this.

Our age knows nothing but reaction, and leaps from one extreme to another.

The mastery of nature is vainly believed to be an adequate substitute for self mastery.

What is funny about us is precisely that we take ourselves too seriously.