War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.

In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

Only old Benjamin professed to remember every detail of his long life and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse--hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.

The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually IN the past. It was like that at this moment.