Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same.
Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.
Public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Orthodoxy is the ability to say two and two make five when faith requires it.
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
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?
The essential point here is that all people with small, insecure incomes are in the same boat and ought to be fighting on the same side. Probably we could do with a little less talk about' capitalist' and 'proletarian' and a little more about the robbers and the robbed.
At any given moment, there is a sort of all pervading orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss large and uncomfortable facts.
One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.
And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.
If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.
The modern writer who has influenced me most is W. Somerset Maugham .
When I talk to anyone or read the writings of anyone who has any axe to grind, I feel that intellectual honesty and balanced judgement have simply disappeared from the face of the earth. Everyone's thought is forensic, everyone is simply putting a "case" with deliberate suppression of his opponent's point of view, and, what is more, with complete insensitiveness to any sufferings except those of himself and his friends.
Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
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.
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils.
No one is patriotic about taxes.
We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull.
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