Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.

A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.

When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.