There are two kinds of imperialists - imperialists and bloody imperialists.

Life ought to be a struggle of desire toward adventures whose nobility will fertilize the soul.

It would be no loss to the world if most of the writers now writing had been strangled at birth.

Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.

The redemptive power of divine grace no longer seemed credible, nor very respectable in the arbitrary performance that was claimed for it.

Here lies the real terror in the international war of ideologies; that a city knows not whom it entertains.

[Evelyn Waugh] made drunkenness cute and chic, and then took to religion, simply to have the most expensive carpet of all to be sick on.