Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proven innocent |
Sanity is not statistical. |
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 the shooting. |
Serious sport is war minus the shooting. |
So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot. |
Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice. |
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious. |
The ''Communism'' of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated. |
The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded |
The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded |
The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim -- for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittenly conscious of anything outside their daily lives -- is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. |
The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature. |
The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun. |
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already. |
The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and whi |