The nation in arms is virtually a communist state: the people must be paid wages and fed and protected and regimented behind the lines as much as on the front. Minds must be kept loyal and at the right pitch of hate, so that successive drafts of fighters are accepted without murmurings. Letters and newspapers must be censored while the propaganda mill grinds on. As for decisions of strategy and overall command, they must please many masters: dissenters in the cabinet, the heads of the allied states and public opinion. Hence failures must be disguised or concealed.

I once worked as a salesman and was very independent. I took orders from no one.

The one thing that unifies men in a given age is not their individual philosophies but the dominant problem that these philosophies are designed to solve.

If civilization has risen from the Stone Age, it can rise again from the Wastepaper Age.

Music, not being made up of objects nor referring to objects, is intangible and ineffable; it can only be as it were inhaled by the spirit: the rest is silence.

Let us face a pluralistic world in which there are no universal churches, no single remedy for all diseases, no one way to teach or write or sing, no magic diet, no world poets, and no chosen races, but only the wretched and wonderfully diversified human race.

It is always some illusion that creates disillusion, especially in the young, for whom the only alternative to perfection is cynicism.