You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.

I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.

If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate.

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 high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

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