“Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.”

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

Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very beginning that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and in the country around it. Rub it in.

Democracy can hardly be expected to flourish in societies where political and economic power is being progressively concentrated and centralized. But the progress of technology has led and is still leading to just such a concentration and centralization of power.

Thanks to words, we have been able to rise above the brutes; and thanks to words, we have often sunk to the level of the demons.

After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

The trouble with fiction,” said John Rivers, “is that it makes too much sense. Reality never makes sense.

life is short and information endless: nobody has time for everything

The goal in life is to discover that you’ve always been where you were supposed to be.

The more you know, the more you see

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.

Children are nowhere taught, in any systematic way, to distinguish true from false, or meaningful from meaningless, statements. Why is this so? Because their elders, even in the democratic countries, do not want them to be given this kind of education.

When the sun rises, it rises for everyone.

I loved listening to laughter even as a little kid.

The young are adept at learning, but even more adept at avoiding it.

It is easy to be nice, even to an enemy – from lack of character.

There are crimes which become innocent and even glorious through their splendor, number and excess.

Bohr’s influence on the physics and the physicists of our century was stronger than that of anyone else, even than that of Albert Einstein.

Even when I was a kid, everything I had was the best.

At 155, I will be the same animal, an even better animal.

So fine that the Irish don’t even acknowledge that it exists.