“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.”

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.

The question of the next generation will not be one of how to liberate the masses, but rather, how to make them love their servitude.

It’s not when you realize that nothing can help you — religion, pride, anything — it’s when you realize that you don’t need any aid.

I never spend my time doing anything I’ll have to do again tomorrow.

I left Scotland when I was 16 because I had no qualifications for anything but the Navy, having left school at 13.

And therewithal, whenever I found out anything remarkable, I have thought it my duty to put down my discovery on paper, so that all ingenious people might be informed thereof.

Look inward and ask not if there is anything outside you want, but whether there is anything inside that you have not yet unpacked.

The things you do for a woman you wouldn’t do for anything else. Same with money.

a little sounder for those who come after. Nobody begins or ends anything. Each person is a link, weak or strong, in an endless chain.

Perhaps I’m not a good actor, but I would be even worse at doing anything else.