One must choose between God and Man, and all “radicals” and “progressives”, from the mildest liberal to the most extreme anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.
How right the working classes are in their “materialism.” How right they are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time!
The life of an animal is misery and slavery: that is the plain truth.
Politics is the choice between the lesser of two evils.
Probably the best nonsense poetry is produced gradually and accidentally, by communities rather than by individuals.
Envy is a horrible thing. It is unlike all other kinds of suffering in that there is no disguising it, no elevating it into tragedy. It is more than merely painful, it is disgusting.
Rich people are poor people with money.
We have sunk so low it has become the obligation of every decent, thinking individual to re-state the obvious!
My best fishing-memory is about some fish that I never caught.
There is no such thing as a naval dictatorship.
During five literary generations every enlightened person had despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.
What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.
Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible.
The end was contained in the beginning.
Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.
It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith – as mysterious as faith itself.
You were the dead; theirs was the future.
Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.
And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?
Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.