Example is better than precept.

My knees could have been stirred with a spoon.

This year's blasphemy is next year's liberating truth.

The role of a do-gooder is not what actors call a fat part.

the role of the Do-Gooder is not what actors call a fat part.

being in the middle class is a feeling as well as an income level.

What I know about money, I learned the hard way – by having had it.

it is a waste of time to ask more of people than they have to give.

In a business society, the emotional economy is an economy of scarcity.

the conversation whipped gaily around the table like rags in a high wind.

Employed as I had been employing it, liquor is a fixative of old patterns.

Father's snoring grows to sound increasingly like a vacuum cleaner in heat.

In some circumstances, the refusal to be defeated is a refusal to be educated.

The important thing about human beings is not what they do, but why they do it.

I was so embarrassed I could feel my nerves curling like bacon over a hot fire.

The English never smash in a face. They merely refrain from asking it to dinner.

I am living with a rising generation which talks like people coming out of ether.

Some persons talk simply because they think sound is more manageable than silence.

when I spoke of having a drink, it was a euphemism for having a whole flock of them.

In practice, there is nothing especially dramatic in people getting along well together.

He must have had a magnificent build before his stomach went in for a career of its own.

Bulldogs have been known to fall on their swords when confronted by my superior tenacity.

Folklore is a collection of ridiculous notions held by other people, but not by you and me.

Life itself, however, flows and is sequential and punishes those who try to compartmentalize it.

Identity is not found, the way Pharaoh's daughter found Moses in the bulrushes. Identity is built.

A lady getting a missing belt back from the cleaner couldn't have been more surprised and pleased.

Every time I think I've touched bottom as far as boredom is concerned, new vistas of ennui open up.

The real nature of an ethic is that it does not become an ethic unless and until it goes into action.

Listening to Britons dining out is like watching people play first-class tennis with imaginary balls.

The people who say you are not facing reality actually mean that you are not facing their idea of reality

The soup, thin and dark and utterly savorless, tasted as if it had been drained out of the umbrella stand.

In a business society, the role of sex can be summed up in five pitiful little words. There is money in it.

Living in England, provincial England, must be like being married to a stupid but exquisitely beautiful wife.

A person may be totally unimaginative and have the social vision of a mole, and we still call him a decent man.

Democracy makes many taxing demands on its practitioners, but suspension of the intelligence is not one of them.

I would have felt more comfortable on a girder fifty floors above the street, catching white-hot rivets in a pail.

Equality is an unconscious assumption, and if you feel you are treating someone as an equal, then you are not doing it.

Infants, I note with envy, are receptive to enjoyment in a degree not attained by adults this side of the new Jerusalem.

Englishwomen's shoes look as if they had been made by someone who had often heard shoes described, but had never seen any.

The attitude of the English towards English history reminds one a good deal of the attitude of a Hollywood director towards love.

The great disadvantage of being in a rat race is that it is humiliating. The competitors in a rat race are by definition rodents.

democracy produces both heroes and villains, but it differs from a fascist state in that it does not produce a hero who is a villain.

... the English think of an opinion as something which a decent person, if he has the misfortune to have one, does all he can to hide.

Success does not implant bad characteristics in people. It merely steps up the growth rate of the bad characteristics they already had.

... it takes a great deal to produce ennui in an Englishman and if you do, he only takes it as convincing proof that you are well-bred.

Passionately prejudiced people always turn out, under scrutiny, to be people who cannot get along on a footing of equality with anyone.

... giving up alcohol or cigarettes is a lead-pipe cinch compared to the renunciation of complacence by a former (self-appointed) elite.

people coming away from a session with Dr. S. usually looked as if they had had fifty minutes on the anvil with an apprentice blacksmith.

Working with children is the easiest part of educating for democracy, because children are still undefeated and have no stake in being prejudiced.

Money does not corrupt people. What corrupts people is lack of affection ... Money is simply the bandage which wounded people put over their wounds.

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