There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher’s daughter.
If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.
I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.
A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses.
A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.
Truth becomes untruth if uttered by your enemy.
The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency...
Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.
Every Joke is a Tiny Revolution.
A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.
Before the war, and especially before the Boer War, it was summer all the year round.
Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it.
Money writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, O Lord, give me money, only money.
The cheaper books become, the less money is spent on books.