The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions - racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war - which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.

...the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.

Freedom is the right to tell others what they don't want to hear.

A Socialist United States of Europe seems to me the only worth-while political objective today

There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter.

Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?

It had never occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work til it was coarse in the grain like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful. But is was so, and after all, he thought, why not?