Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.
Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.
War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.
When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
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.
Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.
The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.
The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.
As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are only ‘doing their duty’
Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.