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.
War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.
He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.
Even through the shut window pane, the world looked cold.
Mrs Weaver nosed among the books, too dim-witted to grasp that they were in alphabetical order.
He loved Big Brother.
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.
There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.
I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.
Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.
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.