Using clichés is a substitute for thinking

In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer.

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

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

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by inquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings, for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.