One of the biggest mistakes that people make when they think about memes is they try to extend on the analogy with genes. That’s not how it works. It works by realizing the concept of...

Rationalism, which is the feeling that everything is subject to and completely explicable by Reason, consequently rejects everything not visible and calculable.

He was white and shaken, like a dry martini.

Memories are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is best not to stir them.

Curiosity is as much the parent of attention, as attention is of memory.

The execution of any thing considerable implies in the first place previous persevering meditation.

All things are perceived in the light of charity, and hence under the aspect of beauty; for beauty is simply reality seen with the eyes of love.

Man as a pure animal does not exist.

And for mathematical science, he that doubts their certainty hath need of a dose of hellebore.

I reckon I closed down at least two films companies, one of which was in Ealing in the mid 1950s.

But the watchful care of the parent is endless. The youth is never free from the danger of grating interference.

Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. Civil liberty follows as a consequence of this; no usurped power can stand against the artillery of opinion.

The will is what matters – as long as you have that, you are safe.

To an intellectual who is adrift in politics, a theory is an aim; to a true politician his theory is a boundary.

A merry companion is as good as a wagon.

Something like The Haunting is not worth the slightest consideration from me.

My thoughts will be taken up with the future or the past, with what is to come or what has been. Of the present there is necessarily no image.

People get depressed and get attracted to different types of memes. You can trace some of this to how the biological hierarchy is set up.

There is no logical reason why humanity could not be organized as a society, or as a purely economic enterprise, or as a vast book club.

Few of them were to be trusted within reach of a trowel and a pile of bricks.

Success comes to a writer as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed.

All men wish to have truth on their side; but few to be on the side of truth.

Justice is the sum of all moral duty.

Deliberately seek opportunities for kindness, sympathy, and patience.

Pessimism only describes an attitude, and not facts, and hence is entirely subjective.

It may not be impossible, but that our Faculties may be so construed, as always to deceive us in the things we judge most certain and assured.

I wanted to write a story that demanded the viewer’s attention.

To him it is an ocean, unfathomable, and without a shore.

Every man has a certain sphere of discretion which he has a right to expect shall not be infringed by his neighbours. This right flows from the very nature of man.