The commercial class has always mistrusted verbal brilliancy and wit, deeming such qualities, perhaps with some justice, frivolous and unprofitable.

One of the vices of the virtue of decentralization is that people don't share ideas.

For a few political turncoats there is real excuse. One can hardly blame those whom one ministry have seen fit to throw overboard for having the strength to swim to the other side.

The poorest education that teaches self-control is better than the best that neglects it.

conversation is now pretty well a lost art.

It is, I think, a good deal owing to the preponderance of the commercial element in Society that conversation has sunk to its present dull level of conventional chatter.

A valuable qualification of a modern politician seems to be a capacity for concealing or explaining away the truth.

If all men and women were kept at some useful employment there would be less sorrow and wickedness in the world.

The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing in the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

There are only two moments when everything is possible in this life, " said Petrus, "when one drinks, and when one makes up stories.

Swiftly the remembrance of all things is buried in the gulf of eternity.

I think it was when I ran into Kerouac and Burroughs - when I was 17 - that I realized I was talking through an empty skull... I wasn't thinking my own thoughts or saying my own thoughts.

We're not destroying the world because we're clumsy. We're destroying the world because we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it.

When you think about a composer you know like Wagner or Pier Boulez or something like that most of the issues a composer is working with are about discreet, notated music that someone else will play.

We may say of agreeableness, as distinct from beauty, that it is a symmetry whose rules are unknown.

I'm not about to talk about what's romantic in my life - I figure if you talk about it once - then that's an open invitation for everyone to dig into your personal life even further

Over emphatic negatives always suggest that what is being denied may be what is really being asserted.

In paganism light is mixed with darkness, and religion and truth are blended with superstition and error.

I must be sincere towards what I am. ... Experimenting is the only thing that fills me with enthusiasm. ... It is the only sphere where I feel really honest and sincere.