The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils.

The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another. Marx exploded a hundred tons of dynamite beneath the moralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are at work and fresh dynamite is being tamped in place to blow Marx at the moon. Then Marx, or somebody like him, will come back with yet more dynamite, and so the process continues, to an end we cannot foresee.

Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist

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

It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except your own attitude: the predestined thing happened in any case.

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.

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