 There are few ironclad rules of diplomacy but to one there is no exception. When an official reports that talks were useful, it can safely be concluded that nothing was accomplished. |
| Meetings are indispensable when you don't want to do anything. |
| Total physical and mental inertia are highly agreeable, much more so than we allow ourselves to imagine. A beach not only permits such inertia but enforces it, thus neatly eliminating all problems of guilt. It is now the only place in our overly active world that does. |
| Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. |
| War remains the decisive human failure. |
| Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite. |
| There are times in politics when you must be on the right side and lose. |
| In the choice between changing ones mind and proving there's no need to do so, most people get busy on the proof. |
| It would be foolish to suggest that government is a good custodian of aesthetic goals. But, there is no alternative to the state. |
| The salary of the chief executive of a large corporation is not a market award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm personal gesture by the individual to himself. |
| Wealth, in even the most improbable cases, manages to convey the aspect of intelligence. |
| There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting. |
| You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too. |
| The great dialectic in our time is not, as anciently and by some still supposed, between capital and labor; it is between economic enterprise and the state. |
| Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom. |
| If all else fails, immortality can always be assured by spectacular error. |
| In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone. |
| Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof. |
| Few people at the beginning of the nineteenth century needed an adman to tell them what they wanted. |
| By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man. |
