“One cannot really be Catholic & grown-up.”
“The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.”
“To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”
“Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.”
“Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.”
“No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.”
“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.”
“He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him).”
“Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.”
“A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.”
“Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.”
“Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”
“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.”
“If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics --a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage --surely that proves that you are in the right?”
“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.”
“Four legs good, two legs bad.”
“A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.”
“Myths which are believed in tend to become true.”
“A liberal is a power worshipper without the power.”
“Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.”
“To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.”
“Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.”
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
“Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.”
“Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.”
“Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.”
“Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness”
“To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.”
“Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.”
“Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.”