Politics, as hopeful men practise it in the world, consists mainly of the delusion that a change in form is a change in substance.

Men are the only animals that devote themselves, day in and day out, to making one another unhappy. It is an art like any other. Its virtuosi are called altruists.

Experience is a poor guide to man, and is seldom followed. What really teaches a man is not experience, but observation.

No married woman ever trusts her husband absolutely, nor does she ever act as if she did trust him. Her utmost confidence is as wary as an American pickpocket's confidence that the policeman on the beat will stay bought.

Socialism: nothing more than the theory that the slave is always more virtuous than his master.

The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.

I never agree with Communists or any other kind of kept men.