A political theory seeks to find from history the limits of the politically possible.

I could see that, if not actually disgruntled, he was far from being gruntled.

All stories should have some honesty and truth in them, otherwise you’re just playing about.

There is a soul of truth in error; there is a soul of good in evil.

Government will not fail to employ education, to strengthen its hands, and perpetuate its institutions.

Every minute you are thinking of evil, you might have been thinking of good instead. Refuse to pander to a morbid interest in your own misdeeds. Pick yourself up, be sorry, shake yourself, and go...

The 19th century was the age of Individualism; the 20th and 21st are the ages of Socialism.

The belief of our Reason is an Exercise of Faith, and Faith is an Act of Reason.

I’d written a book of short stories that had won the Somerset Maugham prize so I was respectable, but there was no money in short story writing.

Revolutions are the produce of passion, not of sober and tranquil reason.

In Italy, they add work and life on to food and wine.

Try to arrange things so that you can have a reasonable bit of quiet every day.

It was not long before I was struck with the idea that base ball was just the game for a national sport for Americans.

There is only one cure for gray hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. It is called the guillotine.

As one may bring himself to believe almost anything he is inclined to believe, it makes all the difference whether we begin or end with the inquiry, ‘What is truth?’

We cannot perform our tasks to the best of our power, unless we think well of our own capacity.

Capitalism is not an economic system, but a world-outlook, or rather, a part of a whole world-outlook.

Sudden success in golf is like the sudden acquisition of wealth. It is apt to unsettle and deteriorate the character.

Big Brother sounded like a silly stunt and that’s what it is.

Preach not because you have to say something, but because you have something to say.

Let us not, in the eagerness of our haste to educate, forget all the ends of education.

God is acting on your soul all the time, whether you have spiritual sensations or not.

The early American arrived at a land of which he knew nothing.

Strategy is buying a bottle of fine wine when you take a lady out for dinner. Tactics is getting her to drink it.

I’m in my 80s and not a keen television fan.

Perseverance is an active principle, and cannot continue to operate but under the influence of desire.

It is usually people in the money business, finance, and international trade that are really rich.

You don’t have to be peculiar to find God.

Base Ball, to be played thoroughly, requires the possession of muscular strength, great agility, quickness of eye, readiness of hand, and many other faculties of mind and body that mark the man of nerve.

The fascination of shooting as a sport depends almost wholly on whether you are at the right or wrong end of the gun.

Honesty is the best policy; but he who is governed by that maxim is not an honest man.

If he who employs coercion against me could mould me to his purposes by argument, no doubt he would. He pretends to punish me because his argument is strong; but he really punishes me because...

I believe it would be unrealistic to expect a film that takes The Lord of the Rings and translates it, page by page, to the screen.

Every non-political human grouping of whatever kind, legal, social, religious, economic or other becomes at last political if it creates an opposition deep enough to range men against one another as enemies.

Golf, like measles, should be caught young.

I always put humour into my stories because if you construct a horrific scene of some kind you have to balance that with an equal quantity of humour.

A man is called selfish not for pursuing his own good, but for neglecting his neighbor’s.

If a thing be really good, it can be shown to be such.

God is always coming to you in the Sacrament of the Present Moment. Meet and receive Him there with gratitude in that sacrament.

The important part of Marxism was its demand for active, constant, practical, class-war.

The true measure of life is not length, but honesty.

Nothing could be recorded in those days except by aiming a movie camera at the television screen. It was at least another 10 years before they had any kind of recording medium.

The philosophy of the wisest man that ever existed, is mainly derived from the act of introspection.

Travel is very subjective. What one person loves, another loathes.

Adoration is caring for God above all else.

The game was being sharply played on both sides, and I watched it with deeper interest than any previous ball match between clubs I had seen.

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.

The happiest lot for a man, as far as birth is concerned, is that it should be such as to give him but little occasion to think much about it.

The lessons of their early youth regulated the conduct of their riper years.

Maybe it’s just my own chronic morbidity and melancholia, but I really do think about it a great deal and quite often in the small hours of the night when, it is said, the greatest...