Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.
The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.
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.
Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.
Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.
Big Brother is watching you.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
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.
I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.
One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.
Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.