The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent. |
The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life. |
The crowds in the big towns, with their mild, knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar boxes. |
The English are not happy unless they are miserable, the Irish are not at peace unless they are at war, and the Scots are not at home unless they are abroad |
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection … that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. |
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. |
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection. |
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. |
The existence of good bad literature /the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously /is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration. |
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. |
The high sentiments always win in the end, the leaders who offer blood, toil, tears, and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. |
The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time. |
The main motive for ''nonattachment'' is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. |
The main motive for "nonattachment" is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. |
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. |