The best years are when you know what you're doing.

The English can laugh and at the same time strike you down, without the least compunction. It is the secret of their success as a nation.

I just wanted to be an ordinary, middle-class person. When I was at Cambridge I made great efforts to lose the last remnants of my cockney accent.

There is no humiliation worse than the consciousness of a wasted life. It stains the spirit, forestalls hope, and destroys any motive for action or change.

You don't have to be brought up in a grand house to have a sense of the past, and I truly believe that there are certain people to whom or through whom the territory - the place, the past - speaks.

I don't believe necessarily the past is in the past. It's eternal, it's all around us.

Every book for me is a chapter in the long book which will finally be closed on the day of my death.

The endless chatter of this journey had wearied me.

Yes, I have inherited the past because I have acknowledged it at last? And, now that I have come to understand it, I no longer need to look back.

I believe that the gods themselves are frightened of the world which they have fashioned.

One can forgive Shakespeare anything, except one's own bad lines.

Oh, what darkness does great prosperity cast over our minds!

The church holds the key to revival. It is within our grasp.

Freedom is not an ideal, it is not even a protection, if it means nothing more than freedom to stagnate, to live without dreams, to have no greater aim than a second car and another television set.

Good taste comes more from the judgment than from the mind.

He'll call that trickle-down. I call it Niagara Falls.

Flattery is the worst and falsest way of showing our esteem.

If you run around with 9 losers pretty soon you'll be the 10th loser.

These are very dainty and superrefined, but really vile.

When you fail to distinguish Law and Gospel, you lose both.

It is impossible to defeat an ignorant man in argument.