In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth.
The great advantage of the sort of education I had was precisely that it made practically no mark upon those subjected to it.
One of the stupidest theories of Western life.
I simply make this point, that the monarchy in so far, as it is identified with what is, in my opinion, an obsolete class structure, is making a mistake, and the task of those who are responsible for the conduct of the monarchical institution is to detach it from that class structure.
I beg you to believe that life is not a process, it’s a drama.
Travel, of course, narrows the mind.
Television was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity.
Politicians get their power too late, and I think that he has inherited an impossible situation in which he is ill-equipped to deal.
I will lift mine eyes unto the pills. Almost everyone takes them, from the humble aspirin to the multi-colored, king-sized three deckers, which put you to sleep, wake you up, stimulate and soothe you all in one. It is an age of pills.
My opinion, my conviction, gains immensely in strength and sureness the minute a second mind as adopted it.
I never met a rich man who was happy, but I have only very occasionally met a poor man who did not want to become a rich man.
Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it.
Humor is practically the only thing about which the English are utterly serious.
A decrepit society shuns humor as a decrepit individual shuns drafts.
The trouble with kingdoms of heaven on earth is that they’re liable to come to pass, and then their fraudulence is apparent for all to see. We need a kingdom of heaven in Heaven, if only because it can’t be realized.
He was not only a bore; he bored for England.
The Sputnik is just to me like a firework, a rocket, a new invention.
Surely the glory of journalism is its transience.
The English have this extraordianry respect for longevity. The best example of this was Queen Victoria, a most unpleasant woman who achieved a sort of public affection simply by living to be an enormous age.
The “pursuit of happiness” is responsible for a good part of the ills and miseries of the modern world.