Serious sport is war minus the shooting.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.

The primary aim of modern warfare ... is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.

She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty years. At the end of it she was still singing.

His answer to every problem, every setback was “I will work harder!” —which he had adopted as his personal motto.

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.