---

To look backward for a while is to refresh the eye, to restore it, and to render it the more fit for its prime function of looking forward.

---

I gather, young man, that you wish to be a Member of Parliament. The first lesson that you must learn is, when I call for statistics about the rate of infant mortality, what I want is proof that fewer babies died when I was Prime Minister than when anyone else was Prime Minister. That is a political statistic.

---

Politics is made up largely of irrelevancies.

---

We have staked the whole future of American civilization, not upon the power of government, far from it. We have staked the future of all of our political institutions upon the capacity of mankind of self-government; upon the capacity of each and all of us to govern ourselves, to control ourselves, to sustain ourselves according to the Ten Commandments of God.

---

Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and other organizations habitually engage in only because they cannot actually masturbate.

---

A sympathetic Scot summed it all up very neatly in the remark, "You should make a point of trying every experience once, excepting incest and folk dancing."

---

Of the delights of this world, man cares most for sexual intercourse, yet he has left it out of his heaven.

---

Be on the alert to recognize your prime at whatever time of your life it may occur.

---

Language exists only on the surface of our consciousness. The great human struggles are played out in silence and in the ability to express oneself.

---

There is a certain age at which a child looks at you in all earnestness and delivers a long, pleased speech in all the true inflections of spoken English, but with not one recognizable syllable. There is no way you can tell the child that if language had been a melody, he had mastered it and done well, but that since it was in fact a sense, he had botched it utterly.

---