A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a childs eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.

To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.