The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.
It is in the social sphere, in the realm of politics and economics, that the Will to Order becomes really dangerous.
Most kings and priests have been despotic, and all religions have been riddled with superstition.
The effectiveness of political and religious propaganda depends upon the methods employed, not upon the doctrines taught. These doctrines may be true or false, wholesome or pernicious it makes little or no difference.
The traveller’s-eye view of men and women is not satisfying. A man might spend his life in trains and restaurants and know nothing of humanity at the end. To know, one must be an actor as well as a spectator.
The essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.
Liberty? Why it doesn’t exist. There is no liberty in this world, just gilded cages.
A type of revolutionary novelty may be extremely beautiful in itself; but, for the creatures of habit that we are, its very novelty tends to make it illegible, at any rate to begin with.
Words are magical in the way they affect the minds of those who use them.
Christianity accepted as given a metaphysical system derived from several already existing and mutually incompatible systems.
When an artist deserts to the side of the angels, it is the most odious of treasons.
The pursuit of truth is just a polite name for the intellectual’s favorite pastime of substituting simple and therefore false abstractions for the living complexities of reality.
Dictators can always consolidate their tyranny by an appeal to patriotism.
Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.
Hell is the incapacity to be other than the creature one finds oneself ordinarily behaving as.
People are much too solemn about things – I’m all for sticking pins into episcopal behinds.
A competent portraitist knows how to imply the profile in the full face.
Since Mozart’s day composers have learned the art of making music throatily and palpitatingly sexual.
Every significant artist is a metaphysician, a propounder of beauty-truths and form-theories.
What the rest of us see only under the influence of mescalin, the artist is congenitally equipped to see all the time.