In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth.
It is simply that America is very rich and very powerful and generally speaking everybody hates the rich and the powerful.
The truth is that a lost empire, lost power and lost wealth provide perfect circumstances for living happily and contentedly in our enchanted island.
As Man alone, Jesus could not have saved us; As God alone, He would not; Made flesh, He could and did.
It’s the circumstances of popular monarchy, the manner in which it’s developed, and it is also the fault of the people who present her with this unquestioning adulation. In other words, it’s their lack of a larger faith. Which makes them fasten onto, a purely earthly symbol.
There’s nothing is this world more instinctively abhorrent to me than finding myself in agreement with my fellow-humans.
I have to say that I think that Anthony Eden was probably the most disastrous Prime Minister in our history, and I am not forgetting Lord North and a few people like that.
Civilization – a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures.
The skyscrapers began to rise again, frailly massive, elegantly utilitarian, images in their grace, audacity and inconclusiveness, of the whole character of the people who produces them.
I have had my television aerials removed. It is the moral equivalent of a prostate operation.
An orgy looks particularly alluring seen through the mists of righteous indignation.
American Women: How they mortify the flesh in order to make it appetizing! Their beauty is a vast industry, their enduring allure a discipline which nuns or athletes might find excessive.
I think Winston Churchill is an appallingly bad politician, and always has been, that he hung onto power long after he should have done, and that his post-war administration was a disaster.
It’s very nearly impossible to tell the truth in television.
Animistic savages prostrating themselves before a painted stone have always seemed to me to be nearer the truth than any Einstein or Bertrand Russell.
The hallmark of religion is to distrust claims made for mortal men. It is in ages of great religious faith that great skepticism can find expression.
Education, the great mumbo jumbo and fraud of the age.
For us humans, everything is permanent – until it changes, as we are immortal until we die.
I accept the fact I am an unregenerate egghead.
I think that once you’ve produced a conformist, a totally conformist society, a society in which there were no critics, that would in fact be an exact equivalent of the totalitarian societies against which we are supposed to be fighting in a cold war.
The price you pay for being powerful and being rich is to be hated.