We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

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.

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

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

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.