Politically, Swift was one of those people who are driven into a sort of perverse Toryism by the follies of the progressive party of the moment.

Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

There exists a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.

He had moved from thought to words, and now from words to actions.

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.

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

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