I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt |
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness |
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting. |
Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be. |
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket. |
All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome. |
At fifty everyone has the face he deserves. |
In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. |
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. |
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. |
In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. |
In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act. |
Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. |
Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice. |
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time. |
Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end |
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. |
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm. |
The quickest way to end a war is to lose it. |
