Everything everything in war is barbaric... But the worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being.

The surrealists and the modern movement in painting as a whole seemed to offer a key to the strange postwar world with its threat of nuclear war. The dislocations and ambiguities in cubism and abstract art as well as the surrealists reminded me of my childhood in Shanghai.

I shall proceed from the simple to the complex. But in war more than in any other subject we must begin by looking at the nature of the whole for here more than elsewhere the part and the whole must always be thought of together.

However much we may sympathize with a small nation confronted by a big and powerful neighbours we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in a war simply on her account.

It was quite a European war until 1917 when the Americans joined up. They don't have the same sense of the loss of innocence and the cataclysmic loss of life. A whole generation was wiped out.

Total war is no longer war waged by all members of one national community against all those of another. It is total... because it may well involve the whole world.

Of all liars the most arrogant are biographers: those who would have us believe having surveyed a few boxes full of letters diaries bank statements and photographs that they can play at the recording angel and tell the whole truth about another human life.

When one is frightened of the truth then it is never the whole truth that one has an inkling of.

Popular opinions on subjects not palpable to sense are often true but seldom or never the whole truth.

I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth.