Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.
Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.
I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.
Good writing is like a windowpane.
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.
Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
