Man, without a saving touch of woman in him, is too doltish, too naive and romantic, too easily deluded and lulled to sleep by his imagination to be anything above a cavalryman, a theologian or a corporation director.
The Catholic clergy seldom bother to make their arguments plausible; it is plain that they have little respect for human intelligence, and indeed little belief in its existence.
There is nothing worse than an idle hour, with no occupation offering. People who have many such hours are simply animals waiting docilely for death. We all come to that state soon or late. It is the curse of senility.
Before a man speaks it is always safe to assume that he is a fool. After he speaks, it is seldom necessary to assume it.
Women have simple tastes. They get pleasure out of the conversation of children in arms and men in love.
It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.
Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.
Love is the delusion that one woman differs from another.
A national political campaign is better than the best circus ever heard of, with a mass baptism and a couple of hangings thrown in.
The only really happy folk are married women and single men.
The public, with its mob yearning to be instructed, edified and pulled by the nose, demands certainties; it must be told definitely and a bit raucously that this is true and that is false. But there are no certainties.
Of all forms of visible otherworldliness, it seems to me, the Gothic is at once the most logical and the most beautiful. It reaches up magnificently-and a good half of it is palpably useless.
The Americans are the illegitimate children of the English.
High-toned humanitarians constantly overestimate the sufferings of those they sympathize with.
The chief business of the nation, as a nation, is the setting up of heroes, mainly bogus.
It is surely no mere coincidence that the land of the emancipated and enthroned woman is also the land of canned soup, of canned pork and beans, of whole meals in cans, and of everything else ready made.
Anyhow, the hole in the donut is at least digestible.
If a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies.
In human history a moral victory is always a disaster, for it debauches and degrades both the victor and the vanquished.
Culture itself is neither education nor law-making: it is an atmosphere and a heritage.