 Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing. |
| Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper. |
| Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be. |
| War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent. |
| A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion. |
| Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. |
| I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment. |
| 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. |
| In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. |
| For a creative writer possession of the "truth" is less important than emotional sincerity. |
| The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature. |
| Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. |
| I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt. |
| To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization. |
| Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. |
| All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. |
| 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. |
| In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act. |
| Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion. |
| Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. |
