Civilization — a heap of rubble scavenged by scrawny English Lit. vultures.

This horror of pain is a rather low instinct and… if I think of human beings I’ve known and of my own life, such as it is, I can’t recall any case of pain which...

History will see advertising as one of the real evil things of our time. It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that.

In retrospect, all these exercises in self-gratification seem pure fantasy, what Pascal called, licking the earth.

Sex is the ersatz or substitute religion of the 20th Century

There is no such thing as darkness; only a failure to see.

like trying a man’s finger for having pulled the trigger of a gun which murdered someone.

I can say that I never knew what joy was like until I gave up pursuing happiness, or cared to live until I chose to die. For these two discoveries I am beholden to Jesus.

One of the many pleasures of old age is giving things up

One of the stupidest theories of Western life.

Few men of action have been able to make a graceful exit at the appropriate time

Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it.

People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to

The orgasm has replaced the Cross as the focus of longing and the image of fulfillment.

One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we’ve developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they...

Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.

Good taste and humour are a contradiction in terms, like a chaste whore.

For as we abolish the ills and pains of the flesh we multiply those of the mind, so by the time mankind are finally delivered from disease and decay – all pasteurised, their genes counted...

Christianity . . . sees the necessity for man to have spiritual values and it shows him how to get at those through physical sacraments.

It was a somber place, haunted by old jokes and lost laughter. Life, as I discovered, holds no more wretched occupation than trying to make the English laugh.

Travel, of course, narrows the mind.

A pornography of the will

St. Teresa of Avila described our life in this world as like a night at a second-class hotel.

People think of faith as being something that you don’t really believe, a device in helping you believe simply it. Of course that is quite wrong. As Pascal says, faith is a gift of God....

The first thing I remember about the world…is that I was a stranger in it. This feeling, which is at once the glory and desolation of homo sapiens, provides the only thread of consistency that...

[Evelyn Waugh] was an antique in search of a period, a snob in search of a class.

Sex is the mysticism of materialism and the only possible religion in a materialistic society.

The genius of Man in our time has gone into jet-propulsion, atom-splitting, penicillin-curing, etc. There is none over for works of imagination; of spiritual insight or mystical enlightenment. I asked for bread and was given...

The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.

On television I feel like a man playing piano in a brothel; every now and again he solaces himself by playing ‘Abide with Me’ in the hope of edifying both the clients and the inmates

My opinion, my conviction, gains immensely in strength and sureness the minute a second mind as adopted it.

An orgy looks particularly alluring seen through the mists of righteous indignation.

Surely the glory of journalism is its transience.

[Pascal] was the first and perhaps is still the most effective voice to be raised in warning of the consequences of the enthronement of the human ego in contradistinction to the cross, symbolizing the ego’s...

He [Sir Anthony Eden] is not only a bore but he bores for England.

The trouble with kingdoms of heaven on earth is that they’re liable to come to pass, and then their fraudulence is apparent for all to see. We need a kingdom of heaven in Heaven, if...

Good taste and humor are a contradiction in terms, like a chaste whore.

The pursuit of happiness, which American citizens are obliged to undertake, tends to involve them in trying to perpetuate the moods, tastes and aptitudes of youth.

All new news is old news happening to new people

The most terrible thing about materialism, even more terrible than its proneness to violence, is its boredom, from which sex, alcohol, drugs, all devices for putting out the accusing light of reason and suppressing the...

There is something ridiculous and even quite indecent in an individual claiming to be happy. Still more a people or a nation making such a claim. The pursuit of happiness… is without any question the...

The truth is that a lost empire, lost power and lost wealth provide perfect circumstances for living happily and contentedly in our enchanted island.

Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.

There’s a large strain of irony in our human affairs… Interwoven with our affairs is this wonderful spirit of irony which prevents us from ever being utterly and irretrievably serious, from being unaware of the...

Marx and Freud are the two great destroyers of Christian civilization, the first replacing the gospel of love by the gospel of hate, the other undermining the essential concept of human responsibility

He was not only a bore; he bored for England.

Television was not invented to make human beings vacuous, but is an emanation of their vacuity.

I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it has been applied, will be one of the greatest jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will...

How do I know pornography depraves and corrupts? It depraves and corrupts me