Eddie Fislinger's church was an octagonal affair, with the pulpit in one angle, an arrangement which produced a fascinating, rather dizzy effect, reminiscent of the doctrine of predestination.

The fact that none of these civic worriers had ever heard of such a case was unimportant, because they all had heard of somebody who had heard of it!

I'm not a humming-bird. I'm a hawk; a tiny leashed hawk, pecked to death by these large, white, flabby, wormy hens.

On the whole, with scandalous exceptions, Democracy has given the ordinary worker more dignity than he ever had.

The greatest mystery about a human being is not his reaction to sex or praise, but the manner in which he contrives to put in twenty-four hours a day. It is this which puzzles the longshoreman about the clerk, the Londoner about the bushman.

Funny how the world always praises its opera-singers so much and pays 'em so well and then starves its shoemakers, and yet it needs good shoes so much more than it needs opera -- or war or fiction.

These folks from New York are all so high and mighty, with their skyscrapers and banquets and everything that t if we don't guess they come from there when we first lay an eye on 'em, we just show ourselves as awful rubes. Oh, yes! Yes. You can always tell 'em by their touch-me-not ways.

If there is anything worse than the aching tedium of staring out of car windows, it is the irritation of getting tickets, packing, finding trains, lying in bouncing berths, washing without water, digging out passports, and fighting through customs. To live in Carlsbad is seemly and to loaf at San Remo healing to the soul, but to get from Carlsbad to San Remo is of the devil.

It is an unimaginatively standardized background, a sluggishness of speech and manners, a rigid ruling of the spirit by the desire to appear respectable. It is contentment ... the contentment of quiet dead, who are scornful of the living for their restless walking. It is negation canonized as the one positive virtue. It is the prohibition of happiness. It is dullness made God.

The world and all its wisdom is but a booby, blundering school-boy that needs management and could be managed, if men and women would be human beings instead of just business men, or plumbers, or army officers, or commuters, or educators, or authors, or clubwomen, or traveling salesmen, or Socialists, or Republicans, or Salvation Army leaders, or wearers of cloths.

Advertising is a valuable economic factor because it is the cheapest way of selling goods, particularly if the goods are worthless.

People will buy anything that is 'one to a customer.'

What are these unheard of sins you condemn so much -- and like so well?

We want our Utopia now.

Like all ardent agnostics, Martin was a religious man.

The towers of Zenith aspired above the morning mist; austere towers of steel and cement and limestone, sturdy as cliffs and delicate as silver rods.

I think perhaps we want a more conscious life. We're tired of drudging and sleeping and dying. We're tired of seeing just a few people able to be individualists. We're tired of always deferring hope till the next generation.

When he gets uppity about his supposed learning, I just take it on myself to remind him that God and his angels know almost as much as college professors.

He had never dined with a duchess, never received a prize, never been interviewed, never produced anything which the public could understand, nor experienced anything since his schoolboy amours which nice people could regard as romantic. He was, in fact, an authentic scientist.

Pugnacity is a form of courage, but a very bad form.