“Don’t try to behave as though you were essentially sane and naturally good. We’re all demented sinners in the same cosmic boat – and the boat is perpetually sinking.”

Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects… totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.

Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.

Medical science has made such tremendous progress that there is hardly a healthy human left.

The greatest triumphs of propoganda have been accomplished, not by doing something, but by refraining from doing. Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth.

Beauty is worse than wine, it intoxicates both the holder and beholder.

Man is unique in organizing the mass murder of his own species.

Liberties are not given, they are taken.

Experience teaches only the teachable.

Never have so many been manipulated so much by so few.

It’s a little embarrassing that after 45 years of research & study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other.

To be a fool at the right time is also an art.

All war propaganda consists, in the last resort, in substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings. Similarly, those who defend war have invented a pleasant sounding vocabulary of abstractions in which to describe the process of mass murder.

Every ceiling reached becomes a floor.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

The greater part of the population is not very intelligent, dreads responsibility, and desires nothing better than to be told what to do. Provided the rulers do not interfere with its material comforts and its cherished beliefs, it is perfectly happy to let itself be ruled.

He accepts his boredom, when it comes, not merely philosophically, but almost with pleasure.

I don’t read music. Not even essentially. Not even nonessentially.

A mien which seems to say, “You are looking at somebody now.” For this inner sense of worth that comes with being in love does not seem to depend essentially on whether the love is returned or not.

This began, most recognizably, with the rejection of politically-oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort.

A cinema villain essentially needs a moustache so he can twiddle with it gleefully as he cooks up his next nasty plan.

The Grateful Dead plays at religious services essentially.

NATO’s essentially run by the United States.

Crony capitalism is essentially a condition in which… public officials are giving favours to people in the private sector in payment of political favours.

It is not the contact with an essentially foreign population that corrupts the inhabitants of the great foreign resorts.