A Collection of Essays

The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it.

But read him for five pages, ten pages, and you feel the peculiar relief that comes not so much from understanding as from being understood. "He knows all about me," you feel; "he wrote this specially for me." It is as though you could hear a voice speaking to you, a friendly American voice, with no humbug in it, no moral purpos

In a tropical landscape one's eye takes in everything except the human beings.

it is a matter of daring just as much as of technique—to expose the imbecilities of the inner mind,

The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped.

People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it.

If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza? Almost certainly you are both. There is one part Of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting ag

how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature?

In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.