It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children.
The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction.
England will still be England, an everlasting animal, stretching into the future and the past and like all living things having the power to change out of all recognition and yet remain the same.
One defeats a fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one’s intelligence.
This life we live nowadays. It’s not life, it’s stagnation death-in-life. Look at all these bloody houses and the meaningless people inside them. Sometimes I think we’re all corpses. Just rotting upright.
Is not anyone with any degree of mental honesty conscious of telling lies all day long, both in talking and writing, simply because lies will fall into artistic shape when truth will not?
The only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.
We were once told that the aeroplane had “abolished frontiers”; actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable.
There are some situations from which one can only escape by acting like a devil or a lunatic.
Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other.
The prime necessities for success in life are money, athleticism, tailor made clothes and a charming smile.
The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.
Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished forever.
Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does.
The existence of good bad literature – the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one’s intellect simply refuses to take seriously – is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.
Reality is inside the skull.
England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.
Surely, comrades, you don’t want Jones back?
He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.
Let’s face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.