Quotes by William Inge

• Consciousness is a phase of mental life which arises in connection with the formation of new habits. When habit is formed, consciousness only interferes to spoil our performance.
• Whoever marries the spirit of this age will find himself a widower in the next.
• We have enslaved the rest of the animal creation, and have treated our distant cousins in fur and feathers so badly that beyond doubt, if they were able to formulate a religion, they would depict the Devil in human form.
• True faith is belief in the reality of absolute values.
• There are no rewards or punishments - only consequences.
• A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbours.
• A man may build himself a throne of bayonets, but he can't sit on it.
• Many people believe that they are attracted by God, or by Nature, when they are only repelled by man.
• Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter.
• Theater is, of course, a reflection of life. Maybe we have to improve life before we can hope to improve theater.
• I have never understood why it should be considered derogatory to the Creator to suppose that he has a sense of humour.
• I think middle-age is the best time, if we can escape the fatty degeneration of the conscience which often sets in at about fifty.
• In dealing with Englishmen you can be sure of one thing only, that the logical solution will not be adopted.
• It is astonishing with how little wisdom mankind can be governed, when that little wisdom is its own.
• The enemies of freedom do not argue; they shout and they shoot.
• Literature flourishes best when it is half a trade and half an art.
• Worry is interest paid on trouble before it comes due.
• No Christian can be a pessimist, for Christianity is a system of radical optimism.
• Nobody is bored when he is trying to make something that is beautiful or to discover something that is true.
• Originality is undetected plagiarism.
• Prayer gives a man the opportunity of getting to know a gentleman he hardly ever meets. I do not mean his maker, but himself.
• Public opinion, a vulgar, impertinent, anonymous tyrant who deliberately makes life unpleasant for anyone who is not content to the average person.
• The happiest people seem to be those who have no particular cause for being happy except that they are so.
• The aim of education is the knowledge not of facts but of values.
• It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism, while the wolf remains of a different opinion.
• To become a popular religion, it is only necessary for a superstition to enslave a philosophy.