“Almost everyone who has gone to the bad early in life has had a deceitful mother.”

Take the life-lie away from the average man and straight away you take away his happiness.

There can be no freedom or beauty about a home life that depends on borrowing and debt.

Oh, law and order! I often think it is that that is at the bottom of all the misery in the world.

Look into any man’s heart you please, and you will always find, in every one, at least one black spot which he has to keep concealed.

So to conduct one’s life as to realize oneself-this seems to me the highest attainment possible to a human being. It is the task of one and all of us, but most of us bungle it.

There is so much falsehood both at home and at school. At home one must not speak, and at school we have to stand and tell lies to the children.

A party is like a sausage machine, it grinds up all sorts of heads together into the same baloney.

It was then that I began to look into the seams of your doctrine. I wanted only to pick at a single knot; but when I had got that undone, the whole thing raveled out. And then I understood that it was all machine-sewn.

It’s not only what we have inherited from our father and mother that walks in us. It’s all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling to us all the same, and we can’t get rid of them.

A forest bird never wants a cage.

It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals; let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians.

A friend married is a friend lost.

Most critical fault-finding, when reduced to its essentials, simply amounts to reproach of the author because he is himself — thinks, feels, sees, and creates, as himself, instead of seeing and creating in the way the critic would have done.

I am sticking as closely to my subject as I can; for my subject is precisely this, that it is the masses, the majority

The worst that a man can do to himself is to do injustice to others.

I propose to raise a revolution against the lie that the majority has the monopoly of the truth.

Early summer days are a jubilee time for birds. In the fields, around the house, in the barn, in the woods, in the swamp – everywhere love and songs and nests and eggs.

Heaven gives its favourites-early death.

The office of president requires the constitution of an athlete, the patience of a mother, the endurance of an early Christian.

Selsdon Man is designing a system of society for the ruthlessness and the pushing, the uncaring. His message to the rest is: you’re out on your own.

I am learning on every job I do. There is something new every time.

In regard to propaganda the early advocates of universal literacy and a free press envisaged only two possibilities: the propaganda might be true, or the propaganda might be false. They did not foresee what in fact has happened, above all in our Western capitalist democracies.

I am a vegetable man anyway. And I also get a lot of rest. That’s the key I may be up early, but I’m in bed early too.

I began writing early – very, very early… I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, ‘Now I’m a writer.’ I’ve always been a writer.