It’s normally agreed that the question How are you? doesn’t put you on your oath to give a full or honest answer. So when asked these days, I tend to say something cryptic like, A bit early to say. (I...
It is odd, when you think about it, that we accuse racists of discrimination. This is the very thing of which they are by definition incapable: They think all members of certain groups are the same.
It is among men of genius and science that Atheism alone is found, but among these alone is cherished an hostility to those errors, with which the illiterate and vulgar are infected. How small is the...
It doesn't matter how obscure or arcane or esoteric your place of publication may be: some sweet law ensures that the person who should be scrutinizing your work eventually does do so.
In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it i...
If we permit our imagination to traverse the obscure regions of possibility, we may doubtless imagine, according to the complexion of our minds, that disorder may have a relative tendency to unmingled...
Government regulations required that an elevator be installed for the use of the disabled. Mother would not allow an elevator. The city offered to pay for the elevator. Its offer was refused. After al...
For the party of order, disorder has always had its uses.
Created sick, and then commanded to be well. This is one of the first, easiest, and most obvious of the satirical maxims that eventually lay waste to the illusion of faith.
Avoid stock expressions (like the plague, as William Safire used to say) and repetitions. Don't say that as a boy your grandmother used to read to you, unless at that stage of her life she really was...
An individual deficient in the sense of humor represents more of a challenge to our idea of the human than a person of subnormal intelligence
Allow a friend to believe in a bogus prospectus or a false promise and you cease, after a short while, to be a friend at all.
Allow a friend to believe in a bogus prospectus or a false promise and you cease, after a short while, to be a friend at all. How dare you intervene? As well ask, How dare you not?
A rule of thumb with humor; if you worry that you might be going too far, you have already not gone far enough. If everybody laughs, you have failed.
A good conversation is the only human equivalent: the realizing that decent points are being made and understood, that irony is in play, and elaboration, and that a dull and obvious remark would be al...
For a fuller account of the revelations of the Moscow archives, and their detailed vindication of Orwell, see my Introduction to Orwell in Spain (Penguin, 2001).
There are people who cannot forget, as neither do I, the lesson of the years of the Indochina War. Which was, first, that the state is capable of being a murderer. A mass murderer, and a conspirator a...
As with the normal life, one finds that every passing day represents more and more relentlessly subtracted from less and less. In other words, the process both etiolates you and moves you nearer towar...
[R]eligion was the race's first (and worst) attempt to make sense of reality. It was the best the species could do at a time when we had no concept of physics, chemistry, biology or medicine. We did n...
The high ambition, therefore, seems to me to be this: That one should strive to combine the maximum of impatience with the maximum of skepticism, the maximum of hatred of injustice and irrationality w...