I want to know what passion is. I want to feel something strongly.

The vast majority of human beings are not interested in reason or satisfied with what it teaches.

It takes two to make a murder. There are born victims, born to have their throats cut, as the cut-throats are born to be hanged.

That all men are equal is a proposition to which, at ordinary times, no sane human being has ever given his assent.

Man is unique in organizing the mass murder of his own species.

Amour is the one human activity of any importance in which laughter and pleasure preponderate, if ever so slightly, over misery and pain.

Primroses and landscapes, he pointed out, have one grave defect: they are gratuitous. A love of nature keeps no factories busy. It was decided to abolish the love of nature, at any rate among the lower classes. . . . it was essential that they should keep on going to the country, even though they hated it.