My early and invincible love of reading I would not exchange for all the riches of India.

Nobody should teach anywhere for 25 years, but I did.

The gallery in which the reporters sit has become a fourth estate of the realm.

Style is the image of character.

People crushed by law have no hopes but from power. If laws are their enemies, they will be enemies to laws.

I can’t visualize the situation in which we nuke ourselves into extinction.

We hold that the most wonderful and splendid proof of genius is a great poem produced in a civilized age.

The laws of probability, so true in general, so fallacious in particular.

Soldiers, when committed to a task, can’t compromise. It’s unrelenting devotion to the standards of duty and courage, absolute loyalty to others, not letting the task go until it’s been done.

Few of the many wise apothegms which have been uttered have prevented a single foolish action.

I am indeed rich, since my income is superior to my expenses, and my expense is equal to my wishes.

Perhaps no person can be a poet, or even enjoy poetry, without a certain unsoundness of mind.

I don’t look to find an educated person in the ranks of university graduates, necessarily. Some of the most educated people I know have never been near a university.

Nothing is so useless as a general maxim.

My English text is chaste, and all licentious passages are left in the decent obscurity of a learned language.

Some people are more terrorist than others.

Nothing except the mint can make money without advertising.

It has always been my practice to cast a long paragraph in a single mould, to try it by my ear, to deposit it in my memory, but to suspend the action of the pen...

Reform, that we may preserve.

The style of an author should be the image of his mind, but the choice and command of language is the fruit of exercise.

I don’t think that what’s going on in Bosnia is political activity. It’s partly political, but it’s partly atavistic as well.

Any stigma, as the old saying is, will serve to beat a dogma.

Hope, the best comfort of our imperfect condition.

The great Chinese classics have always said that it’s better not to fight; that the clever man achieves his ends without violence; that a battle delayed is better than a battle fought.

I was never less alone than when by myself.

Such night in England ne’er had been, nor ne’er again shall be.

I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son.

I think Americans like the practical; they like the human. And I like both those things myself, and I try and put them into my books.

Autobiography is an unrivaled vehicle for telling the truth about other people.

Corruption, the most infallible symptom of constitutional liberty.

The great men of power who seek to change the nations they belong to usually are pretty terrible people.

The winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.

Temple was a man of the world amongst men of letters, a man of letters amongst men of the world.

We improve ourselves by victories over ourselves. There must be contest, and we must win.

I think that black Africa is extremely terrifying. Black Africa can become a maelstrom of warring tribes without the outside world needing to feel the need to do anything about it.

People who jump to conclusions rarely alight on them.

Fanaticism obliterates the feelings of humanity.

The Islam of the 18th, 19th and first half of the 20th century was a poor thing. Nobody bothered about it. Islam was that funny sort of pure system of beliefs that depressed people in...

The leader of men in warfare can show himself to his followers only through a mask, a mask that he must make for himself, but a mask made in such form as will mark him...

That is the best government which desires to make the people happy, and knows how to make them happy.

I understand by this passion the union of desire, friendship, and tenderness, which is inflamed by a single female, which prefers her to the rest of her sex, and which seeks her possession as the...

I think to be shot in a mountain valley somewhere or other is altogether less glorious than crashing an airliner into a skyscraper.

The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reigns: James I, James II, and the Old Pretender.

The pathetic almost always consists in the detail of little events.

The revival of Islam dates from the early years of the 20th century. It was brought about by their humiliation, by their sense of how low they’d fallen compared with the West.

There are certain wicked people in the world that you can’t deal with except by force.

The conformation of his mind was such that whatever was little seemed to him great, and whatever was great seemed to him little.

Our work is the presentation of our capabilities.

If Wellington epitomizes the English gentleman, Eisenhower epitomizes the natural American gentleman.

Any stigma will do to beat a dogma.