America is supposed to be given over to ugliness. There are a good many ugly things there and the ugliest are the most pretentious.

Personality is lower than partiality.

Above all nations is humanity.

We Jews regard our race as superior to all humanity, and look forward, not to its ultimate union with other races, but to its triumph over them.

The novelist must look on humanity without partiality or prejudice. His sympathy, like that of the historian, must be unbounded, and untainted by sect or party.

No student of history can fail to see the moral interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see their aesthetic interest.

Ottawa - a sub-arctic lumber-village converted by royal mandate into a political cockpit.

There are the manufacturing multitudes of England; they must have work, and find markets for their work; if machines and the Black Country are ugly, famine would be uglier still.

The Roman legions were formed in the first instance of citizen soldiers, who yet had been made to submit to a rigid discipline, and to feel that in that submission lay their strength.

Yet for my part, deeply as I am moved by the religious architecture of the Middle Ages, I cannot honestly say that I ever felt the slightest emotion in any modern Gothic church.

Art is expression, and to have high expression you must have something high to express.

Freedom of speech is unnecessary if the people to whom it is granted do not think for themselves.

God’s on your side

To set but a low value upon toast is to expose one's deficiencies in right appreciation.

When I die, I shall be content to vanish into nothingness.... No show, however good, could conceivably be good forever I do not believe in immortality, and have no desire for it.

I learned how to make a documentary by having a good team around me. My editors (and co-writers)Bent-Jorgen Perlmutt and Frédéric Tcheng were very helpful.

An election is an opportunity for a new consensus.

We seem to be always on cusps. Women come out of the burkah, the niqab, purdah, the closet, then go back in again. Of course, what we need do is to value the happy freedom of all beings.

Let there be no illusions. The Communion is broken and fragmented. The Communion will break.

It didn't matter what you looked like. It was how you carried yourself, how you saw yourself.