The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.

The primary aim of modern warfare ... is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas of which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the high-brow periodicals.

All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.

There were sins that were too subtle to be explained, and there were others that were too terrible to be clearly mentioned. For example, there was sex, which was always smouldering just under the surface and which suddenly blew up into a tremendous row when I was about twelve.

The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system.

Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.