For the ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics) he feels himself master of his fate, but against major events he is as helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavoring to influence the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him.

A thing which I regret, and which I will try to remedy some time, is that I have never in my life planted a walnut. Nobody does plant them nowadays-when you see a walnut it is almost invariably an old tree. If you plant a walnut you are planting it for your grandchildren, and who cares a damn for his grandchildren?

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery.

The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

Every war, when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.