The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

It was given out that the animals there practised cannibalism, tortured one another with red-hot horseshoes, and had their females in common. This was what came of rebelling against the laws of Nature, Frederick and Pilkington said.

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

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any practical result whatsoever, you've beaten them.

Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by inquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings, for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.