I don't approve of open fires. You can't think, or talk or even make love in front of a fireplace. All you can do is stare at it.

Millions of American women, and some men, commit that outrage every summer day. They are turning a superb treat into mere provender. Shucked and boiled in water, sweet corn is edible and nutritious; roasted in the husk in the hottest possible oven for forty minutes, shucked at the table, and buttered and salted, nothing else, it is ambrosia. No chef’s ingenuity and imagination have ever created a finer dish. American women should themselves be boiled in water.

The trouble with an alarm clock is that what seems sensible when you set it seems absurd when it goes off

Man's brain, enlarged fortuitously, invented words in an ambitious attempt to learn how to think, only to have them usurped by his emotions. But we still try.

I will ride my luck on occasion, but I like to pick the occasion.

I cannot agree that mountain climbing is merely one manifestation of man's spiritual aspirations. I think instead it is a hysterical paroxysm of his infantile vanity.

There is only one object on earth that frightens me: a physicist working on a new trick.