★ Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.
★ A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes. ★ Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience. ★ If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it. ★ Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen. ★ We have the best government that money can buy. ★ It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog. ★ Age is an issue of mind over matter. If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter. ★ A person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds. ★ Principles have no real force except when one is well-fed. ★ Few things are harder to put up with than the annoyance of a good example. ★ Don’t let schooling interfere with your education. ★ There are lies, damned lies and statistics.
Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage. ★ The gambling known as business looks with austere disfavour upon the business known as gambling. ★ Corporation: An ingenious device for obtaining profit without individual responsibility. ★ Conservative: A statesman who is enamoured of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal who wishes to replace them with others. ★ Cynic: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. ★ Future: That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured. ★ The covers of this book are too far apart. ★ Compromise: Such an adjustment of conflicting interests as gives each adversary the satisfaction of thinking he has got what he ought not to have, and is deprived of nothing except what was justly his due. ★ Bore: A person who talks when you wish him to listen. ★ Mad: Affected with a high degree of intellectual independence. ★ Revolution: In politics, an abrupt change in the form of misgovernment. ★ Consult: To seek approval for a course of action already decided upon. ★ Deliberation: The act of examining one’s bread to determine which side it is buttered on
I am not young enough to know everything. ★ Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes. ★ I have the simplest tastes. I am always satisfied with the best. ★ What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. ★ Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess. ★ A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it.
★ Whenever people agree with me I always feel I must be wrong. ★ An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all. ★ The only thing to do with good advice is to pass it on. It is never of any use to oneself. ★ Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. ★ Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason. ★ Arguments are to be avoided: they are always vulgar and often convincing. ★ I can stand brute force, but brute reason is quite unbearable. There is something unfair about its use. It is hitting below the intellect. ★ Be yourself; everyone else is already taken ★ Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation ★ You will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you never had the courage to commit.
The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. ★ To tell the truth is revolutionary. ★ I turn and turn in my cell like a fly that doesn’t know where to die. ★ I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will. ★ My practicality consists in this, in the knowledge that if you beat your head against the wall it is your head which breaks and not the wall – that is my strength, my only strength. ★ History is at once freedom and necessity. ★ Destruction is difficult. It is as difficult as creation. ★ Every State is a dictatorship. ★ Telling the truth is always revolutionary. ★ Man is above all else mind, consciousness — that is, he is a product of history, not of nature. ★ Indifference is the dead weight of history. ★ What comes to pass does so not so much because a few people want it to happen, as because the mass of citizens abdicate their responsibility and let things be. ★ The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum there arises a great diversity of morbid symptoms. ★ How many times have I wondered if it is really possible to forge links with a mass of people when one has never had strong feelings for anyone, not even one’s own parents: if it is possible to have a collectivity when one has not been deeply loved oneself by individual human creatures. Hasn’t this had some effect on my life as a militant–has it not tended to make me sterile and reduce my quality as a revolutionary by making everything a matter of pure intellect, of pure mathematical calculation?
★ Everything simple is false. Everything complex is unusable. ★ Our most important thoughts are those that contradict our emotions. ★ Those who cannot attack the thought, instead attack the thinker. ★ A man is infinitely more complicated than his thoughts. ★ At times I think and at times I am. ★ There is no theory that is not a fragment, carefully prepared, of some autobiography. ★ War: a massacre of people who don’t know each other for the profit of people who know each other but don’t massacre each other. ★ The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up. ★ The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be. ★ We are enriched by our reciprocate differences. ★ Politics is the art of preventing people from busying themselves with what is their own business. ★ The purpose of psychology is to give us a completely different idea of the things we know best. ★ Our judgments judge us, and nothing reveals us, exposes our weaknesses, more ingeniously than the attitude of pronouncing upon our fellows. ★ Politeness is organised indifference. ★ That which has been believed by everyone, always and everywhere, has every chance of being false. ★ Power without abuse loses its charm. ★ History is the science of things which are not repeated.. ★ Love is being stupid together. ★ A great man is one who leaves others at a loss after he is gone. ★ A businessman is a hybrid of a dancer and a calculator. ★ Man’s great misfortune is that he has no organ, no kind of eyelid or brake, to mask or block a thought, or all thought, when he wants to.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. ★ Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. ★ If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. ★ We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. ★ But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. ★ Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell. ★ Liberal: a power worshipper without power. ★ Big Brother is watching you. ★ War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. ★ Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. ★ On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time. ★ All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. ★ Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them
The unexamined life is not worth living. ★ The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing. ★ Beware the barrenness of a busy life. ★ Wisdom begins in wonder. ★ An honest man is always a child. ★ Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have laboured hard for. ★ I was really too honest a man to be a politician and live. ★ If a man is proud of his wealth, he should not be praised until it is known how he employs it. ★ Ordinary people seem not to realize that those who really apply themselves in the right way to philosophy are directly and of their own accord preparing themselves for dying and death. ★ Be as you wish to seem. ★ Let him that would move the world first move himself. ★ From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate. ★ It is not living that matters, but living rightly. ★ False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil. ★ If all misfortunes were laid in one common heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be contented to take their own and depart. ★ A system of morality which is based on relative emotional values is a mere illusion, a thoroughly vulgar conception which has nothing sound in it and nothing true. ★ Where there is reverence there is fear, but there is not reverence everywhere that there is fear, because fear presumably has a wider extension than reverence. ★ I only wish that ordinary people had an unlimited capacity for doing harm; then they might have an unlimited power for doing good.