ILKA CHASE

It is usually when men are at their most religious that they behave with the least sense and the greatest cruelty.

Among famous traitors of history one might mention the weather.

America's best buy is a telephone call to the right man.

The only people who never fail are those who never try.

You can always spot a well informed man - his views are the same as yours.

Wart hogs should sue for libel. It is a terrible name and they are fine fellows and devoted family men and it is rare to see one by himself; the little woman and the kiddies are usually close at hand.

When he said we were trying to make a fool of him, I could only murmur that the Creator had beat us to it.

Democracy is not an easy form of government, because it is never final; it is a living, changing organism, with a continuous shifting and adjusting of balance between individual freedom and general order.

People are subject to moods, to temptations and fears, lethargy and aberration and ignorance, and the staunchest qualities shift under the stresses and strains of daily life.

It occurred to me that we live in a lunatic world where the only way to maintain peace is to have an enormous war-making machine.

Keeping your coat on indoors in Russia, no matter how public the place, is far worse than keeping your hat on as the flag goes by. It is worse than going into a Catholic church in Spain with your upper arms bare. It is worse than telling a mother her baby bores you.

All the humiliating, tragicomic, heartbreaking things happened to me in my girlhood, and nothing makes me happier than to realize I cannot possibly relive my youth.

I always felt that the boiled potato, not the tudor rose, should be the national emblem.

in love, gallantry is necessary. Even when the first wild desire is gone, especially then, there is an inherent need for good manners and consideration, for the putting forth of effort. Two courteous and civilized human beings out of the loneliness of their souls owe that to each other.

The very fact that we make such a to-do over golden weddings indicates our amazement at human endurance. The celebration is more in the nature of a reward for stamina.

On the whole, I haven't found men unduly loath to say, 'I love you.' The real trick is to get them to say, 'Will you marry me?

That is what is so marvelous about Europe; the people long ago learned that space and beauty and quiet refuges in a great city, where children may play and old people sit in the sun, are of far more value to the inhabitants than real estate taxes and contractors' greed.

I think it is every woman's duty to make herself as attractive as her time and means permit. After all, there you are, in your person- a living symbol of the progress of art, science and imagination. To be as attractive as we can be is almost a civic duty; there are so many sad and ugly things in the world that I think women should say to themselves humbly, not with vanity, 'I will try to be as pretty as I can, so that when people look at me, they will feel refreshed. I will make an effort to be easy on the eye.'

We've surrounded the most vital and commonplace human function with a vast morass of taboos, convention, hypocrisy, and plain claptrap.

Young people want to look like peas in a pod, and there is no use trying to make them different.

To me travel is triple delight: anticipation, performance, and recollection.

everything you experience is what constitutes you as a human being, but the experience passes away and the person's left. The person is the residue.

Art, we are told, is a criterion of one's taste. How humiliating, should our taste turn out to be bad. Rather as though we were caught stark naked with a poor figure.

The theater is a baffling business, and a shockingly wasteful one when you consider that people who have proven their worth, who have appeared in or been responsible for successful plays, who have given outstanding performances, can still, in the full tide of their energy, be forced, through lack of opportunity, to sit idle season after season, their enthusiasm, their morale, their very talent dwindling to slow gray death. Of finances we will not even speak; it is too sad a tale.

Love at a distance may be poignant; it is also idealized. Contact, more than separation, is the test of attachment.