Quotes

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.

The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.

Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient means for going backwards.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.

Power is not a means; it is an end.

Napoleon is always right.