The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.

War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

Four legs good, two legs bad.

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

Serious sport is war minus the shooting.

Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.