22 quotes
Every pastime has its attendant politics.
The Apes of God (1930)
Wherever there is objective truth there is satire.
Rude Assignment: An Intellectual Autobiography (1950)
I have been called a Rogue Elephant, a Cannibal Shark, and a crocodile. I am none the worse. I remain a caged, and rather sardonic, lion, in a particularly contemptible and ill-run zoo.
Laughter is the climax in the tragedy of seeing, hearing and smelling self-consciously.
Inferior Religions (1917)
The earth has become one big village, with telephones laid on from one end to the other, and air transport, both speedy and safe.
The prime essential in the solution of the "Jewish problem" is to eradicate entirely from our minds all prejudice and superstition about the Jew.
Satire to be good must be unfair and single-minded. To be backed by intense anger is good — though absolutely not necessary.
The Apes of God (1930)
Being born in a stable does not make you a horse. But living in a studio produces in some persons a feeling that they should dabble and daub a little.
The Apes of God (1930)
Sex was really all bluff — power the thing.
The Apes of God (1930)
The art of advertisement, after the American manner, has introduced into all our life such a lavish use of superlatives, that no standard of value whatever is intact.
Morality is of the surface. But also the values that decide whether a person is ridiculous or free from absurdity are pure conventions of a society, they exist only in a surface-world, of two dimensions.
The Apes of God (1930)
I should invent very little if I were a flatterer. […] I should just encourage people to describe themselves, and use the description they seemed most to relish.
The Apes of God (1930)
That is the sacrosanct period-of-periods — the Victorian death, the birth of Decadence! Ah the pioneer naughtiness of the "Naughty Nineties", that 'Made the World Safe for Homosexuality!'
The Apes of God (1930)
The als ob doctrine of a sportsmanlike average, that is the perfect democrat. […] If you do not acquire this simple democratic habit of make-believe, there is no place for you in contemporary life.
The Apes of God (1930)
[D]oes not all power that is real exact that it shall be visible!
The Apes of God (1930)
The ideas of a time are like the clothes of a season: they are as arbitrary, as much imposed by some superior will which is seldom explicit. They are utilitarian and political, the instruments of smooth-running government.
The Art of Being Ruled (1926)
It could perhaps be asserted, even, that the greatest Satire cannot be moralistic at all: if for no other reason, because no mind of the first order has ever itself been taken in, nor consented to take in others, by the crude injunctions of any purely moral code.
The novelty of any time enables people to pretend that they are existing in the state of society that in fact they have superseded. (It is an old political expedient to pretend to be what you have destroyed.) They will pretend that their abuses are old abuses and that only their reforms are new.
The Apes of God (1930)
Men were only made into "men" with great difficulty even in primitive society: the male is not naturally "a man" any more than the woman. He has to be propped up into that position with some ingenuity, and is always likely to collapse.
The Art of Being Ruled (1926)
Yet it is true that in our democratic society flattery does take the form of saying to people that they are like other people — rather than unlike or possessing something peculiarly their own. And the personal advantages that are chosen to flatter them about are those that they share with great crowds of other people.
The Apes of God (1930)