“The only good human being is a dead one.”

Free speech is my right to say what you don’t want to hear.

I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.

A man receiving charity always hates his benefactor- it is a fixed characteristic of human nature.

Right thinking will be rewarded, wrong thinking punished.

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.

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

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

It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

When I see a policeman with a club beating a man on the ground, I don’t have to ask whose side I’m on.

He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

Despotic governments can stand ‘moral force’ till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

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

From the deepest desires often come the deadliest hate.

A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar. I always laugh at the altar, be it Christian, Hindu, or Buddhist, because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter.

I will not say that your mulberry trees are dead; but I am afraid they’re not alive.

For the anointed, traditions are likely to be seen as the dead hand of the past, relics of a less enlightened age, and not as the distilled experience of millions who faced similar human vicissitudes before.

But when once the earth has sucked up a dead man’s blood, there is no way to raise him up.

Let the dead bury the dead, but while I’m alive, I must live and be happy.

The peace and prosperity we are enjoying now is built on the precious sacrifices of the war dead.

Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.