Imperialism as he [Kipling] sees it is a sort of forcible evangelising.

The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped.

The Communism of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.

The hospital is the antechamber to the tomb

He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.

The planting of a tree, especially one of the long-living hardwood trees, is a gift which you can make to posterity at almost no cost and with almost no trouble, and if the tree takes root it will far outlive the visible effect of any of your other actions, good or evil.

A thing which I regret, and which I will try to remedy some time, is that I have never in my life planted a walnut. Nobody does plant them nowadays-when you see a walnut it is almost invariably an old tree. If you plant a walnut you are planting it for your grandchildren, and who cares a damn for his grandchildren?