“I have a great mind to believe in Christianity for the mere pleasure of fancying I may be damned.”

"Do We Live Again?" an interview with Edison, as quoted in Mr. Edison's New Argument from Design" in The Illustrated London News (3 May 1924).
1920s

His much less famous response, in the late phase of the Battle of Flamborough Head, 23 September 1779, to an inquiry by his opponent (Captain Richard Pearson of the Royal Navy ship HMS Serapis) as to whether he was surrendering his ship, the USS Bonhomme Richard, which was by this time very seriously damaged.
:This was what some of his sailors, reported in British newspapers at the time, claimed he had said; Jones's official report merely stated that he had answered "in the most determined negative".

"...like captured fireflies" (1955); also published in America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (2003), p. 142

Benedetto Croce, The Philosophy of Giambattista Vico. trans. R. G. Collingwood, London 1923.

Source: Naked

Surprised by Joy (1955)

I Don't Know One Editor In India Who Is Well-Read

"The Terrible People"
Many Long Years Ago (1945)
Context: People who have what they want are very fond of telling people who haven't what they want that they really don't want it,
And I wish I could afford to gather all such people into a gloomy castle on the Danube and hire half a dozen capable Draculas to haunt it.
I dont' mind their having a lot of money, and I don't care how they employ it,
But I do think that they damn well ought to admit they enjoy it.

Allegedly said in response to H. G. Wells's criticism of his "alien [i.e. German-descended] and uninspiring court"
Attributed