"A copy of Dante's Purgatorio excited his especial disgust."French, eh?" he said. "I guessed as much, and pretty dirty too, I shouldn't wonder. Now just you wait while I look up these here books"—how he said it!—"in my list. Particularly against books the Home Secretary is. If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.""

"Mrs. Ape's famous hymn, There ain't no flies on the Lamb of God."

"Creative Endeavour lost her wings, Mrs. Ape."

"Anyone who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums who find prison so soul-destroying."

"I haven't been to sleep for over a year. That's why I go to bed early. One needs more rest if one doesn't sleep."

"I expect you'll be becoming a schoolmaster, sir. That's what most of the gentlemen does, sir, that gets sent down for indecent behaviour."

"I came to the conclusion many years ago that almost all crime is due to the repressed desire for aesthetic expression."

"Instead of this absurd division into sexes they ought to class people as static and dynamic."

"That's the public-school system all over. They may kick you out, but they never let you down."

"There is a species of person called a 'Modern Churchman' who draws the full salary of a beneficed clergyman and need not commit himself to any religious belief"

"And the only interest about him arises from the unusual series of events of which his shadow was witness."

"I don't believe that people would ever fall in love or want to be married if they hadn't been told about it. It's like abroad: no one would want to go there if they hadn't been told it existed."

"What is this impulse of two people to build their beastly home? It's you & me, unborn, asserting our presence. All we are is a manifestation of the impulse to family life, and if by chance we have escaped the itch ourselves, Nature forces it upon us another way. (Part One, Chapter XII)"

"It's the seed of life we carry about with us like our skeletons, each one of us unconsciously pregnant with desirable villa residences. There's no escape. As individuals we simply do not exist. We are just potential home builders, beavers, and ants. How do we come into being? What is birth? (Part One, Chapter XII)"

"They should have told me that at the end of that gay journey and flower-strewn path were the hideous lights of home and the voices of children."

"Chokey thinks religion is just divine."

"There will be a prize of half a crown for the longest essay, irrespective of any possible merit."

""We class schools, you see, into four grades: Leading School, First-rate School, Good School, and School. Frankly," said Mr Levy, "School is pretty bad..." (Part One, Chapter One)"

"I'm one of the blind alleys off the main road of procreation."

"'But what am I to teach them?' said Paul in sudden panic."

"'I couldn't understand why God had made the world at all...' I asked my bishop; he didn't know. He said that he didn't think the point arose as far as my practical duties as a parish priest were concerned..' ( Mr Prendergast, Part One , Chapter IV)"

"Augustus Fagan, Esquire, Ph.D., Llanabba Castle, N.Wales, requires immediately junior assistant to teach Classics and English to University Standard with subsidiary Mathematics, German and French. Experience essential;first-class games essential..."

"Mr. Sniggs, the Junior Dean, and Mr. Postlethwaite, the Domestic Bursar, sat alone in Mr. Sniggs's room overlooking the garden quad at Scone College."

"Please bear in mind throughout that IT IS MEANT TO BE FUNNY."

"There is a great deal to be said for the Arts. For one thing they offer the only career in which commercial failure is not necessarily discreditable."

"We cherish our friends not for their ability to amuse us, but for ours to amuse them -- a diminishing number in my case."

"Punctuality is the virtue of the bored."

"Aesthetic value is often the by-product of the artist striving to do something else."

"I put the words down and push them a bit."

"Easter used to mean so much to me. Before Pope John and his Council – they destroyed the beauty of the liturgy. I have not yet soaked myself in petrol and gone up in flames, but I now cling to the Faith doggedly without joy. Church going is a pure duty parade. I shall not live to see it restored. It is worse in many countries."

"I have become very old in the last two years. Not diseased but enfeebled. There is nowhere I want to go and nothing I want to do and I am conscious of being an utter bore. The Vatican Council has knocked the guts out of me."

"A year in which the process of transforming the liturgy has followed a planned course. Protests avail nothing... More than the aesthetic changes which rob the Church of poetry, mystery and dignity, there are suggested changes in Faith and morals which alarm me. A kind of anti-clericalism is abroad which seeks to reduce the priest's unique sacramental position. The Mass is written of as a "social meal" in which the "people of God" perform the consecration. Pray God I will never apostatize but I can only now go to church as an act of duty and obedience."

"I find the new liturgy a temptation against Faith, Hope and Charity but I shall never, pray God, apostatise."

"Nice to go to Rome. They are destroying all that was superficially attractive about my Church. It is a great sorrow to me and for once undeserved. If you see Cardinal Bea spit in his eye."

"[M]y friends and I are totally at a loss to understand the new form of the Mass... Every attendance at Mass leaves me without comfort or edification. I shall never, pray God, apostatize but church-going is now a bitter trial."

"All men now allow that if any human power could have stemmed the avalanche of the French Revolution, it would have been the reforms of Turgot."

"In his home-life Turgot remained most frugal and laborious, treating his servants with a benevolence then accounted contemptible, and working out his quiet schemes with an infinite patience and thoroughness. When he was offered the richer Intendancy of Lyons, he would not take it. Here, as he said of himself, though he was 'the compulsory instrument of great evil,' he was doing a little good. Only a little, it might be. But if every man did the little he could — what a different world!"

"Hopeless, filthy, degraded, superstitious with the craven superstition which made them the easy prey of their unscrupulous clergy and left them wholly sensual and stupid; as animals, without the animals' instinctive joy of life and fearlessness of the morrow ; with no ambitions for themselves or the children who turned to curse them for having brought them into such a world; with no time to dream or love, no time for the tenderness which makes life, life indeed — they toiled for a few cruel years because they feared to die, and died because they feared to live. Such were the people Turgot was sent to redeem."

"'What a fuss about an omelette!' he had exclaimed when he heard of the burning. How abominably unjust to persecute a man for such an airy trifle as that! "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," was his attitude now."

"There is always more goodness in the world than there appears to be, because goodness is of its very nature modest and retiring."

"A Platonic friendship is perhaps only possible when one or other of the Platonists is in love with a third person."

"It is as the father of the Encyclopedia that Denis Diderot merits eternal recognition. Guilty as he was in almost every relation of life towards the individual, for mankind, in the teeth of danger and of infidelity, at the ill-paid sacrifice of the best years of his exuberant life, he produced that book which first levelled a free path to knowledge and enfranchised the soul of his generation."

"If to be great means to be good, then Denis Diderot was a little man. But if to be great means to do great things in the teeth of great obstacles, then none can refuse him a place in the temple of the Immortals."

"It is by character and not by intellect the world is won."

"For the first time he looked into his heart and wrote, and thus for the first time he touched the hearts of others; the cold style took fire, and beneath the clumsy periods welled tears."

"He who has lost only those of whose faith and truth he is sure, has not yet reached the depth of human desolation."

"The advantage of doing one's praising for oneself is that one can lay it on so thick and exactly in the right places."

"There are two classes of people in this world, those who sin, and those who are sinned against; if a man must belong to either, he had better belong to the first than to the second."

"To me it seems that those who are happy in this world are better and more lovable people than those who are not."

"Sensible people get the greater part of their own dying done during their own lifetime."