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

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

In the end I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and that people can be trusted to behave decently if only you will let them alone.

It was not the man's brain that was speaking; it was his larynx.

It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith—as mysterious as faith itself.

Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them. There is almost no kind of outrage-torture, imprisonment without trial, assassination, the bombing of civilians-which does not change its moral color when it is committed by 'our' side. The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.