Humor is the sublime wisdom of pity and tolerance in which man recognizes the utter futility of his own enterprise and importance.
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport; when a tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity.
A Native American elder once described his own inner struggles in this manner: Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time. When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, The one I feed the most.
Both optimists and pessimists contribute to society. The optimist invents the aeroplane, the pessimist the parachute.
I am afraid we must make the world honest before we can honestly say to our children that honesty is the best policy.
There is no subject on which more dangerous nonsense is talked and thought than marriage.
A doctor’s reputation is made by the number of eminent men who die under his care.
When I was young, I observed that nine out of ten things I did were failures. So I did ten times more work.
The English are not a very spiritual people, so they invented cricket to give them some idea of eternity.
It is not pleasure that makes life worth living. It is life that makes pleasure worth having.
A book is like a child: it is easier to bring it into the world than to control it when it is launched there.
Hell is full of musical amateurs: music is the brandy of the damned. May not one lost soul be permitted to abstain?
What is life but a series of inspired follies? The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn’t come every day.
Do not waste your time on Social Questions. What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness.
A fool's brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.
A government that robs Peter to pay Paul can always depend on the support of Paul.
There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart's desire. The other is to gain it.
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.