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

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

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

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.

People often ask me what is the most effective technique for transforming their life. It is a little embarrassing that after years and years of research and experimentation, I have to say that the best answer is – just be a little kinder.

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.

If you don’t gamble, you’ll never win.

The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge.

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.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.

If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can’t be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?

Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you’d collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.

Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and tend to infect others with their discontents.

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.

I came to a stark realization: chronic surpluses could be almost as destabilizing as chronic deficits.

Sometimes, you are going to miss a person who was an almost to you. And feel sad because there is no name for that feeling.

Hollywood is a strange place. The class structure here is more rigid than almost anyplace I’ve ever experienced. It’s made more difficult by the fact that it’s constantly changing.

But if you consider how abnormal their behavior is, then you are led to the hypothesis that almost all men are suffering from ‘testosterone poisoning.’

A taste; a painful longing. but the net is always too porous, and we are left with the sweet frustration of almost knowing, which is teasingly pleasurable.

Almost everybody that’s well-known gets tagged with a nickname.

Rage is caused by a conviction, almost comic in its optimistic origins (however tragic in its effects), that a given frustration has not been written into the contract of life.

There is a kind of serenity in love which is almost a paradise.