Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.

I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.