“One should always avoid unnecessary unhappiness. Especially if one is an immortal. They taught us that in school.”

“Life forces enough final decisions on us. We should have the sense to avoid as many of the unnecessary ones as we can.”

“Everyone knows that you should never wreck your life for a boy, and especially not one that you meet while you're in high school.”

“One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.”

“Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessay sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all sentences short or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.”

“When two men in business always agree, one of them is unnecessary.”