... one doesn't really profit from experience; one merely learns to predict the next mistake.

Children seldom have a proper sense of their own tragedy, discounting and keeping hidden the true horrors of their short lives, humbly imagining real calamity to be some prestigious drama of the grown-up world.

I have a superstition that if I talk about plot, it's like letting sand out of a hole in the bottom of a bag.

In thoughts one keeps a reserve of hope, in spite of everything. You cannot say good-bye in imagination. That is something you can only do in actuality.

I never had, or wished for, power over you. That isn't true, of course. I wanted the greatest power of all. but not advantage, or authority.

Since the moment of the United Nations' inception, untold energies have been expended by governments not only toward the exclusion of persons of principle and distinction from the organization's leading positions, but toward the installation of men whose character and affiliations would as far as possible preclude any serious challenge to governmental sovereignty.

Great literature is like moral leadership; everyone deplores the lack of it, but there is a tendency to prefer it from the safely dead.