To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.
You have not wasted your time; you have helped to save the world. We are not buffoons, but very desperate men at war with a vast conspiracy.
If there were no God, there would be no atheists.
There are no words to express the abyss between isolation and having one ally. It may be conceded to the mathematician that four is twice two. But two is not twice one; two is two thousand times one.
We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.
By a curious confusion, many modern critics have passed from the proposition that a masterpiece may be unpopular to the other proposition that unless it is unpopular it cannot be a masterpiece.
I am not absentminded. It is the presence of mind that makes me unaware of everything else.
Only man can be absurd: for only man can be dignified.
People talk of the pathos and failure of plain women; but it is a more terrible thing that a beautiful woman may succeed in everything but womanhood.
Religious liberty might be supposed to mean that everybody is free to discuss religion. In practice it means that hardly anybody is allowed to mention it.
There is more simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats Grape-Nuts on principle.
To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once.
There are a great many good people, and a great many sane people here this afternoon. Unfortunately, by a kind of coincidence, all the good people are mad, and all the sane people are wicked.
Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.
With every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand.
Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms.
Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
Most modern freedom is at root fear. It is not so much that we are too bold to endure rules; it is rather that we are too timid to endure responsibilities.
It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.