On a very rough-and-ready basis we might define an eccentric as a man who is a law unto himself, and a crank as one who, having determined what the law is, insists on laying it down to others. An eccentric puts ice cream on steak simply because he likes it; should a crank do so, he would endow the act with moral grandeur and straightaway denounce as sinners (or reactionaries) all who failed to follow suit [:] Cranks, at their most familiar, are a sort of peevish prophets, and it's not enough that they should be in the right; others must also be in the wrong.

For tens of millions of people television has become habit-forming, brain-softening, taste-degrading.

Highly educated bores are by far the worst; they know so much, in such fiendish detail, to be boring about.

Individualism is rather like innocence; there must be something unconscious about it.

Society, in the aggregate, is no fool. It is astonishing what an amount of 'eccentricity' it will stand from anybody who takes the bull by the horns, too fearl…

There's a right way of doing things and a wrong way. If you've made up your mind to be different from everybody else, I don't suppose I can stop you, but I rea…

Thy wisdom speaks in me, and bids me dare Beacon the rocks on which high hearts are wreckt. I never was attached to that great sect, Whose doctrine is, that ea…