On Christmas Day it is proclaimed that Christianity established peace on earth and good will towards men. Next day the Christian, with refreshed soul, goes back to the manufacture of submarines and torpedoes.

I . . . once read the Old Testament and the four Gospels straight through, from a vainglorious desire to do what nobody else had done.

With the single exception of Homer, there is no eminent writer, not even Sir Walter Scott, whom I can despise so entirely as I despise Shakespeare when I measure my mind against his.

Patriotism is, fundamentally, a conviction that a particular country is the best in the world because you were born in it.

I dread success. To have succeeded is to have finished one’s business on earth, like the male spider, who is killed by the female the moment he has succeeded in his courtship. I like a state of continual becoming, with a goal in front and not behind.

We do not seek for truth in the abstract. . . .

The man of business . . . goes on Sunday to the church with the regularity of the village blacksmith, there to renounce and abjure before his God the line of conduct which he intends to pursue with all his might during the following week.

The Family is a petty despotism; . . . a school in which men learn to despise women and women to mistrust men (much more than is necessary); a slaughterhouse for children (the firstborn succumbing to unskilled treatment, the lastborn to neglect). . . . Unfortunately, we cannot as yet do without it; and therefore we put a good face on the matter by conferring upon it the conventional attribute of sacredness, and impudently proclaiming it the source of all the virtues it has well-nigh killed in us.

[ Question asked by Shaw to presidential candidate Michael Dukakis regarding his wife :] Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?

An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood: a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.