Quotes to inspire and reflect

What a country calls its vital economic interests are not the things which enable its citizens to live, but the things which enable it to make war.

This is the biggest electric train a boy ever had!

All sins are attempts to fill voids.

We think caged birds sing, when indeed they cry.

’Tis just like a summer birdcage in a garden; the birds that are without despair to get in, and the birds that are within despair, and are in a consumption, for fear they shall never get out.

Call for the robin-red-breast and the wren,

We are merely the stars’ tennis-balls, struck and bandied

Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle: she died young.

A typical triumph of modern science to find the only part of Randolph that was not malignant and remove it.

I know death hath ten thousand several doors

News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that it’s dead.

‘Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole’ … ‘Yes,’ said the Managing Editor. ‘That must be good style.’

Any one who has been to an English public school will always feel comparatively at home in prison. It is the people brought up in the gay intimacy of the slums, Paul learned, who find prison so soul-destroying.

Up to a point, Lord Copper.

I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they.

You can’t hold a man down without staying down with him.

I think it pisses God off if you walk by the colour purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.

No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.

The quietly pacifist peaceful always die

Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise.

I who have cursed

Did this happen to your mother? Did your sister throw up a lot?

I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.

This is no time for making new enemies.

The composition of a tragedy requires testicles.

The art of government is to make two-thirds of a nation pay all it possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third.

It is amusing that a virtue is made of the vice of chastity; and it’s a pretty odd sort of chastity at that, which leads men straight into the sin of Onan, and girls to the waning of their colour.

Quoi que vous fassiez, écrasez l’infâme, et aimez qui vous aime.

We owe respect to the living; to the dead we owe only truth.

God is on the side not of the heavy battalions, but of the best shots.

It is one of the superstitions of the human mind to have imagined that virginity could be a virtue.

Governments need both shepherds and butchers.

History is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes.

This agglomeration which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

Si Dieu n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer.

All styles are good except the boring kind.

Superstition sets the whole world in flames; philosophy quenches them.

The secret of being a bore … is to tell everything.

Le mieux est l’ennemi du bien.

Common sense is not so common.

Il faut cultiver notre jardin.

[Men] use thought only to justify their injustices, and speech only to conceal their thoughts.

Dans ce pays-ci il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral pour encourager les autres.

These two nations have been at war over a few acres of snow near Canada, and … they are spending on this fine struggle more than Canada itself is worth.

If we do not find anything pleasant, at least we shall find something new.

Dans ce meilleur des mondes possibles … tout est au mieux.

Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas. Lucky is he who has been able to understand the causes of things.

Sed fugit interea, fugit inreparabile tempus.