We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.
Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.
Within any important issue, there are always aspects no one wishes to discuss.
Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.
Liberal: a power worshipper without power.
Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
Rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon – so long as there is no answer to it – gives claws to the weak.
Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
For a creative writer possession of the ‘truth’ is less important than emotional sincerity.
Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing.
Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.
The Puritanical nonsense of excluding children and therefore to some extent women from pubs has turned these places into mere boozing shops instead of the family gathering places that they ought to be.
You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.
All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.
There are some things only intellectuals are crazy enough to believe.
The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.
All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.
What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?