Optimistic lies have such immense therapeutic value that a doctor who cannot tell them convincingly has mistaken his profession.

Telling the truth is the funniest joke in the world.

It is monstrous that custom should force us to display our faces ostentatiously, however worn and wrinkled and mean they may be, whilst carefully concealing all our other parts, however shapely and well preserved.

You can lose a man like that by your own death, but not by his.

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

It is said that every people has the Government it deserves. It is more to the point that every Government has the electorate it deserves; for the orator of the front bench can edify or debauch an ignorant electorate at will.

We all have--to put it as nicely as I can--our lower centres and our higher centres. Our lower centres act: they act with terriblepower that sometimes destroys us; but they don't talk.... Since the war the lower centres have become vocal. And the effect is that of an earthquake. For they speak truths that have never been spoken before--truths that the makers of our domestic institutions have tried to ignore.