If we had to offer the briefest explanation of all the evil that men have wreaked upon themselves and upon the world since the beginning of time right up until tomorrow it would not be in the terms of man’s animal hereditary, his instinct and his evolution. It would be simply in the toll that his pretense of sanity takes as he tries to deny his true condition.
Religion springs from the collective belief in immortality; art from the personal consciousness of the individual.
Men are so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness.
None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it. And, once they’re done they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.
Long Day’s Journey into Night
Who knows who might be the target of the well read man?
Fahrenheit 451
Death solves all problems. If there is no person, there is no problem.
My memory says this did happen. But my conscience says ’twere better if it had not happened. Gradually memory yields to the dictates of conscience.
Brave New World
“I’d rather be myself, ” he said. “Myself and nasty. Not somebody else, however jolly.”
A gramme is always better than a damn.
Everybody’s happy nowadays
Was and will make me ill
I take a gramme and only am
When he at last achieved fame and success he was a dying man and knew it. He had fame and was too ill to leave his room. Money and nothing to spend it on, love in which he could not participate; he tasted the bitterness of dying.
On George Orwell
The progression of the artist is a continual extinction of personality. One constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a window pane.
The crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.
In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood
For I had lost the right path.
I have felt the wind of the wings of madness.
I feel that every step in my plan has been taken with Divine help.
60,000 of his men would be destroyed the next day at the Battle of the Somme – 1916
The mass needs, and we give it, leaders who have the firmness and decision of command proceeding from habit and an entire faith in their unquestionable right to command as established by tradition, law and society.
Never underestimate the power of the need to obey.
All men, whoever they are are more or less brutes when they have power or guns in their hands and a reasonable excuse for using them. They all have the same latent bad streak, the so called decent ones, the Good Samaritans. Only, in peace time this bad streak shows itself in hating the next door neighbor or somebody who is more successful. In war a soldier kills and enjoys killing.
Technology without hatred can be a blessing, though not always. Technology with hatred is always a disaster. What will happen to this world when the haters of today, the terrorists, come into possession of the technology of our times?
There is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
Not everything that counts can be counted and not everything that can be counted, counts.