A life based on reason will always require to be balanced by an occasional bout of violent and irrational emotion, for instinctual drives must be satisfied

The true work of art is the one which the seventh wave of genius throws up the beach where the undertow of time cannot drag it back.

The civilization of one epoch becomes the manure of the next.

When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized. Why has he acquired a seventy years life-span only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself? Why has he thrown Conscience, like a dead rat, to putrefy in the well?

He [George Orwell] would not blow his nose without moralising on conditions in the handkerchief industry.

Whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising.

It is a mistake to expect good work from expatriates for it is not what they do that matters but what they are not doing.