In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.
It is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life.
Why should be fruit be held inferior to the flower?
The belly comes before the soul.
I have no wish to take life, not even human life.
For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.
If you have no money, men won’t care for you, women won’t love you; won’t, that is, care for you or love you the last little bit that matters.
A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into.
No one is patriotic about taxes.
Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
Never have ideas about children, and never have ideas for them.
The Communism of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.
Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99 percent of the population exist.
And it is a great thing to die in your own bed, though it is better still to die in your boots.
Why was it that they could never shout like that about something that mattered?
The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think worth describing in detail.
He had moved from thought to words, and now from words to actions.
In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except “Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it”? Money has become the grand test of virtue.
The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia’s life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.
There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word – Man.