Nuclear war is inevitable, says the pessimists; Nuclear war is impossible, says the optimists; Nuclear war is inevitable unless we make it impossible, says the realists.

The real heretic is not the atheist or agnostic (who are often decent people) but those who murmur "it doesn't matter what you believe, as long as it makes you feel good." This turns religion into a subjective matter, like taste in furnishings, and robs theology of its claim to ultimate truth.

Marriages we regard as the happiest are those in which each of the partners believes he or she got the best of it.

Ignorance per se is not nearly as dangerous as ignorance of ignorance.

You may be sure that when a man begins to call himself a realist he is preparing to do something that he is secretly ashamed of doing.

Genealogy: A perverse preoccupation of those who seek to demonstrate that their forebears were better people than they are.

Life is, if anything, the art of combination. Of discrimination. Of freely picking one's own personal pattern out of a hundred choices. Not letting it be picked for you—either by the Establishment, or by the Rebels. Conformity of Hip is no better than Conformity of Square.