"Journalism is popular, but it is popular mainly as fiction. Life is one world, and life seen in the newspapers is another"
"If you do not understand a man you cannot crush him. And if you do understand him, very probably you will not"
"Experience which was once claimed by the aged is now claimed exclusively by the young"
"What people call impartiality may simply mean indifference, and what people call partiality may simply mean mental activity"
"There is no such thing on earth as an uninteresting subject; the only thing that can exist is an uninterested person"
"The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land; it is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land"
"A radical generally meant a man who thought he could somehow pull up the root without affecting the flower. A conservative generally meant a man who wanted to conserve everything except his own reason for conserving anything"
"A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things"
"A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice"
"A man who says that no patriot should attack the war until it is over... is saying no good son should warn his mother of a cliff until she has fallen"
"A man does not know what he is saying until he knows what he is not saying"
"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author"
"A businessman is the only man who is forever apologizing for his occupation"
"You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution"
"We call a man a bigot or a slave of dogma because he is a thinker who has thought thoroughly and to a definite end"
"We are justified in enforcing good morals, for they belong to all mankind; but we are not justified in enforcing good manners, for good manners always mean our own manners"
"There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds"
"A stiff apology is a second insult... The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt"
"The poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese"
"The perplexity of life arises from there being too many interesting things in it for us to be interested properly in any of them"
"The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it"
"The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us"
"The family is the test of freedom; because the family is the only thing that the free man makes for himself and by himself"
"The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see"
"The simplification of anything is always sensational"
"The purpose of Compulsory Education is to deprive the common people of their commonsense"
"The present condition of fame is merely fashion"
"Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around"
"Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions"
"To love means loving the unlovable. To forgive means pardoning the unpardonable. Faith means believing the unbelievable. Hope means hoping when everything seems hopeless"
"To be clever enough to get all that money, one must be stupid enough to want it"
"Those thinkers who cannot believe in any gods often assert that the love of humanity would be in itself sufficient for them; and so, perhaps, it would, if they had it"
"Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it"
"There is nothing the matter with Americans except their ideals. The real American is all right; it is the ideal American who is all wrong"
"If I can put one touch of rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God"
"Lying in bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling"
"Love means to love that which is unlovable; or it is no virtue at all"
"Man seems to be capable of great virtues but not of small virtues; capable of defying his torturer but not of keeping his temper"
"Man is an exception, whatever else he is. If he is not the image of God, then he is a disease of the dust. If it is not true that a divine being fell, then we can only say that one of the animals went entirely off its head"
"Men always talk about the most important things to perfect strangers. In the perfect stranger we perceive man himself; the image of a God is not disguised by resemblances to an uncle or doubts of wisdom of a mustache"
"The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried"
"The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because generally they are the same people"
"The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them"
"Some men never feel small, but these are the few men who are"
"Science in the modern world has many uses; its chief use, however, is to provide long words to cover the errors of the rich"
"Ritual will always mean throwing away something: destroying our corn or wine upon the altar of our gods"
"People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make"
"I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees"
"I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought, and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder"
"I was planning to go into architecture. But when I arrived, architecture was filled up. Acting was right next to it, so I signed up for acting instead"
