No one asks public men to be strictly moral, but they must seem to be well-behaved.

In France, even heresy rapidly hardens into dogma.

Critics have been amusing themselves for a long time by auscultating fiction for signs of heart failure.

She did not so much cook as assassinate food.

In what touches their social convictions, most persons do not think. The threat of change, with all it suggests to them in the loss of social and economic privilege, alarms so deeply that they are incapable of unprejudiced thought. They seem to themselves to be thinking, with lucidity and fairness, but since they start from the conviction that change must undoubtedly be for the worse or from settled grief at the thought of losing what is old and lovely, they are doing no more than following a logical sequence of ideas from a false premise.

My mind is not suited to go much into company.

A politician is forced to make a habit of noble phrases and optimistic lies. In the end they infect himself.