Once you get to know your neighbors, you are no longer free, you are all tangled up, you have to stop and speak when you are out and you never feel safe when you are in.

Never approach a friend's wife or girlfriend with mischief as your goal... unless she's really attractive.

To lunch with the important ... that should be the daily goal of those for whom life is not a playground but a ladder.

I can think of few things more disastrous than starting a new correspondence with any one. Letters are a burden indeed ... they seem often the last straw that breaks the back ... you should see the piles of those that I must answer that litter and weight my writing table.

If words are to change their meanings, as assuredly they are, let each user of language make such changes as please himself, put up his own suggestions, and let the best win.

The ascendancy over men's minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised, is half-mystical in basis. The intoxication, at once so heady and so devout, is not the romantic melancholy engendered by broken towers and mouldered stones; it is the soaring of the imagination into the high empyrean where huge episodes are tangled with myths and dreams; it is the stunning impact of world history on its amazed heirs.

Cruelty was the devil, and most people were, in one way or another, cruel. Tyranny, suppression, persecution, torture, slavery, war, neglect - all were cruel. The world was acid and sour with hate, fat with greed, yellow with the triumph of the strong and the rich.