Liberties aren't given, they are taken.
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligen...
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain...
Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.
Your true traveller finds boredom rather agreeable than painful. It is the symbol of his liberty - his excessive freedom. He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost...
We participate in tragedy. At comedy we only look.
One of the great attractions of patriotism - it fulfills our worst wishes. In the person of our nation we are able, vicariously, to bully and cheat. Bully and cheat, what's more, with a feeling that w...
Like every other good thing in this world, leisure and culture have to be paid for. Fortunately, however, it is not the leisured and the cultured who have to pay.
The worst enemy of life, freedom and the common decencies is total anarchy their second worst enemy is total efficiency.
A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more...
Silence is as full of potential wisdom and wit as the unhewn marble of great sculpture.
If you have behaved badly repent make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best...
The advertisement is one of the most interesting and difficult of modern literary forms.
It's a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.
The world and the friends that lived in it are shadows: you alone remain real in this drowsing room.
The most valuable of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do, when it has to be done, whether you like it or not.
The finest works of art are precious, among other reasons, because they make it possible for us to know, if only imperfectly and for a little while, what it actually feels like to think subtly and fee...
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.
There will be, in the next generation or so, a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude, and producing dictatorship without tears, so to speak, producing a kind of painless concent...
One is always alone in suffering; the fact is depressing when one happens to be the sufferer, but it makes pleasure possible for the rest of the world.