 Every man's memory is his private literature. |
| Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are dead. |
| That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent. |
| A democracy which makes or even effectively prepares for modern, scientific war must necessarily cease to be democratic. No country can be really well prepared for modern war unless it is governed by a tyrant, at the head of a highly trained and perfectly obedient bureaucracy. |
| God isn't compatible with machinery and scientific medicine and universal happiness. You must make your choice. Our civilization has chosen machinery and medicine and happiness. |
| Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities. |
| Words, words, words! They shut one off from the universe. Three quarters of the time one's never in contact with things, only with the beastly words that stand for them. |
| The more powerful and original a mind, the more it will incline towards the religion of solitude. |
| The most shocking fact about war is that its victims and its instruments are individual human beings, and that these individual beings are condemned by the monstrous conventions of politics to murder or be murdered in quarrels not their own. |
| People intoxicate themselves with work so they won't see how they really are. |
| Official dignity tends to increase in inverse ratio to the importance of the country in which the office is held. |
| You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad. |
| There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that's your own self. |
| The impulse to cruelty is, in many people, almost as violent as the impulse to sexual love - almost as violent and much more mischievous. |
| Idealism is the noble toga that political gentlemen drape over their will to power. |
| What with making their way and enjoying what they have won, heroes have no time to think. But the sons of heroes - ah, they have all the necessary leisure. |
| Europe is so well gardened that it resembles a work of art, a scientific theory, a neat metaphysical system. Man has re-created Europe in his own image. |
| Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves. |
| There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness. |
| Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know. |
