All nationalistic distinctions - all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect - are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people believe in them.

He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.

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

Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.

The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life.