“Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.”

Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment. If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time. On no account brood over your wrongdoing. Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

The development of a vast mass communications industry, concerned in the main neither with the true nor the false, but with the unreal, the more or less totally irrelevant. In a word, they failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.

Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman.

Hug me till you drug me, honey; Kiss me till I’m in a coma.

If one’s different, one’s bound to be lonely.

It isn’t a matter of forgetting. What one has to learn is how to remember and yet be free of the past.

If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb.

Assembled in a crowd, people lose their powers of reasoning and their capacity for moral choice.

A majority of young people seem to develop mental arteriosclerosis forty years before they get the physical kind.

Liberty? Why it doesn’t exist. There is no liberty in this world, just gilded cages.

As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends correspondingly to increase. And the dictator will do well to encourage that freedom…it will help to reconcile his subjects to the servitude which is their fate.

The people who kill and torture and tell lies in the name of their sacred causes, these are never the publicans and the sinners. No, they’re the virtuous, respectable men, who have the finest feelings, the best brains, the noblest ideals.

To be well informed, one must read quickly a great number of merely instructive books. To be cultivated, one must read slowly and with a lingering appreciation the comparatively few books that have been written by men who lived, thought, and felt with style.

The nature of power is such that even those who have not sought it, but have had it forced upon them, tend to acquire a taste for more.

The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols

The measure of woman’s distaste for any part of her life lies not in the loudness of her lamentations (these are only an attempt to buy a martyr’s crown at a reduced price) but in her persistent pursuit of that occupation of which she never ceases to complain.

Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. We will one day understand what causes it, and then cease to call it divine. And so it is with everything in the universe.

When the saint ceases to seek after holiness, purity, righteousness, truth; when he ceases to pray, stops reading the Word and gives way to carnal appetites, then it is that Satan comes.

The moment a man falls into sin, divine life ceases to flow, and his life becomes one of helplessness.

Cut away all that is excessive, straighten all that is crooked, bring light to all that is overcast, labour to make all one glow of beauty and never cease chiselling your statue.

When she had passed, it seemed like the ceasing of exquisite music.

Noble ideas, great sentiments have always existed and have always been transmitted, but wars have never ceased.

Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the ‘environmentalist’ view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view.