The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle, hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or laborer's cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

The Puritanical nonsense of excluding children and therefore to some extent women from pubs has turned these places into mere boozing shops instead of the family gathering places that they ought to be.

Pessimism is reactionary because it makes the very idea of improving the world impossible.

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

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.

There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than through the corruption of language