I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.

Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them. There is almost no kind of outrage-torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, the bombing of civilians-which does not change its moral color when it is committed by 'our' side. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

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.

Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.

It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.