Quote collection
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"I am giving you examples of the fact that this creature man, who in his own selfish affairs is a coward to the backbone, will fight for an idea like a hero. . . . I tell you, gentlemen, if you can shew a man a piece of what he now calls God's work to do, and what he will later call by many new names, you can make him entirely reckless of the consequences to himself personally."
"We should find ourselves committed to killing a great many people whom we now leave living, and to leave living a great many people whom we at present kill. We should have to get rid of all ideas about capital punishment."
"I feel nothing but the accursed happiness I have dreaded all my life long: the happiness that comes as life goes, the happiness of yielding and dreaming instead of resisting and doing, the sweetness of the fruit that is going rotten."
"What really flatters a man is that you think him worth flattering."
"The more ignorant men are, the more convinced are they that their little parish and their little chapel is an apex to which civilization and philosophy has painfully struggled up the pyramid of time from a desert of savagery."
"In heaven an angel is nobody in particular."
"Suppose the world were only one of God's jokes, would you work any the less to make it a good joke instead of a bad one?"
"An Englishman thinks he is moral when he is only uncomfortable."
"Men have to do some awfully mean things to keep up their respectability."
"Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind. It is the deed that teaches not the name we give it."
"Everybody who does not live in a prostitute's bed and on a diet of cocaine snow is called an ascetic nowadays."
"Telling the truth is the funniest joke in the world."
"All the sweetness of religion is conveyed to the world by the hands of storytellers and image-makers. Without their fictions the truths of religion would for the multitude be neither intelligible nor even apprehensible; and the prophets would prophesy and the teachers teach in vain."
"Baseball has the great advantage over cricket of being sooner ended."
"You are all fundamentalists with a top dressing of science. That is why you are the stupidest of conservatives and reactionists in politics and the most bigoted of obstructionists in science itself. When it comes to getting a move on you are all of the same opinion: stop it, flog it, hang it, dynamite it, stamp it out."
"Life would be tolerable but for its amusements."
"Don't order any black things. Rejoice in his memory; and be radiant: leave grief to the children. Wear violet and purple. Be patient with the poor people who will snivel: they don't know; and they think they will live for ever, which makes death a division instead of a bond."
"When Satan makes impure verses, Allah sends a divine tune to cleanse them."
"Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the crimes."
"Obedience simulates subordination as fear of the police simulates honesty."