The clock struck half past two. In the little office at the back of Mr. McKechnie's bookshop, Gordon--Gordon Comstock, last member of the Comstock family, aged twenty-nine and rather moth-eaten already--lounged across the table, pushing a fourpenny packet of Player's Weights open and shut with his thumb.

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn't do the hangman's job.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.

Snobbishness, like hypocrisy, is a check upon behaviour whose value from a social point of view has been underrated.

If there really is such a thing as turning in one's grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.