You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernaturalaid I would hardly be a human being.

[ After Randolph Churchill’s lung was removedand found not to have malignancies :] A typicaltriumph of modern science to find the onlypart of Randolph that was not malignant andremove it.

In the dying world I come from quotation is a national vice. No one would think of makingan after-dinner speech without the help ofpoetry. It used to be the classics, now it’s lyric verse.

Any one who has been to an English publicschool will always feel comparatively at home in prison.

Almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression.

I expect you’ll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That’s what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behavior.

Those huge novels from North America are not the product of diligence; hard labour would refine and clarify them.

Words should be an intense pleasure just as leather should be to a shoemaker.

If one’s object is ascetic, it is far better to stay in London or Paris or New York; there is practically no extreme of heat or cold, physical risk, loneliness, hunger or thirst that cannot, with a little ingenuity, be conveniently achieved in the centres of civilization.

Medical science has oppressed us with a new huge burden of longevity. It is in that last undesired decade, when passion is cold, appetites feeble, curiosity dulled and experience has begotten cynicism, that accidia lies in wait as the final temptation to destruction.