Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.

He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.

In this country, intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face ... Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and incovenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban ... At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of iedas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

True freedom is the right to say something that others don't want to hear.