Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.

• 

  Out of constables we have made grandees, idiots have shared out the honours, thieves are making rich men for us, dark souls have called themselves patriots.

• 

  Every generation, no doubt, believes itself called to remake the world. Mine knows that it will not remake it.

• 

  I want to give a picture of Dublin so complete that if the city one day suddenly disappeared from the earth it could be reconstructed out of my book.

• 

  Capitalism is unequally distributed wealth, and socialism is equally distributed poverty. But the saying is not quite right, for Bolshevism distributes even poverty unequally.

• 

  So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable.

• 

  War propaganda comes down, in the end, to substituting diabolical abstractions for human beings.

All quotes