Liberal: a power worshipper without power.
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
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.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.
War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.
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 when they are unwelcome.
The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.
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.
Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.
Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.
Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.
In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
Serious sport is war minus the shooting.
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
