The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.

We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.

Where this age differs from those immediately preceding it is that a liberal intelligentsia is lacking. Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion, and such truisms as that a machine-gun is still a machine-gun even when a "good" man is squeezing the trigger have turned into heresies which it is actually becoming dangerous to utter.

Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy.

A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war.

I would sooner be a foreigner in Spain than in most countries. How easy it is to make friends in Spain!