It is only by having desire thwarted, and thereby learning to control it — in other words, by becoming civilized — that men become fully human.

The idea that man is a tabula rasa, or Mao's sheet of blank paper upon which the most beautiful characters can be written, is an old one with disastrous implications. I do not think though that the cults you mention could survive honest thought about human nature.

Orders can be benign or malign, but the habit of obeying them can become ingrained.

Where a reputation for intolerance is more feared than a reputation for vice itself, all manner of evil may be expected to flourish.

There is something deeply attractive, at least to quite a lot of people, about squalor, misery, and vice. They are regarded as more authentic, and certainly more exciting, than cleanliness, happiness, and virtue.

There is nothing that an intellectual less likes to change than his mind, or a politician his policy.

The loss of the religious understanding of the human condition—that Man is a fallen creature for whom virtue is necessary but never fully attainable—is a loss, not a gain, in true sophistication. The secular substitute—the belief in the perfection of life on earth by the endless extension of a choice of pleasures—is not merely callow by comparison but much less realistic in its understanding of human nature.