The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.

The typical socialist... a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaler and often with vegetarian leanings.

Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.

Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.