Everyone who wants to do good to the human race always ends in universal bullying.
Cynical realism is the intelligent man’s best excuse for doing nothing in an intolerable situation.
But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.
That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.
I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.
What’s the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?
Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship and at the same time the basic conditions of effective democracy.
Back to culture. Yes, actually to culture. You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.
For in spite of language, in spite of intelligence and intuition and sympathy, one can never really communicate anything to anybody.
Ironically enough, the only people who can hold up indefinitely under the stress of modern war are psychotics. Individual insanity is immune to the consequences of collective insanity.
When people are suspicious with you, you start being suspicious with them.
For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.
We live together, we act on, and react to one another; but always, and in all circumstances, we are by ourselves.
Marble, I perceive, covers a multitude of sins.
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy; their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
There was a thing called Heaven; but all the same they used to drink enormous quantities of alcohol.
Unlike the masses, intellectuals have a taste for rationality and an interest in facts.
At any given moment, life is completely senseless. But viewed over a period, it seems to reveal itself as an organism existing in time, having a purpose, trending in a certain direction.
The leech’s kiss, the squid’s embrace, The prurient ape’s defiling touch: And do you like the human race? No, not much.
Which is better: to have fun with fungi or to have Idiocy with ideology, to have wars because of words, to have tomorrow’s misdeeds out of yesterday’s miscreeds?