Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
We sleep peaceably in our beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf"--Opening to "My Father's Son," attributed to George Orwell
All the habits of Man are evil. And above all, no animal must ever tyrannise over his own kind. Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers. No animal must ever kill any other animal. All an...
Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
The planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root it will far...
Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
The whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish day-dream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because yo...
There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.
Serious sport is war minus the shooting.
No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored w...
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
When you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for this reason that I don't mix much in literary...
Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very...
War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus...
Happiness can exist only in acceptance.