I suppose there is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public school. Here at least one cannot say that English ‘education’ fails to do its job. You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of leaving school — I studied Greek for eight or ten years, and now, at thirty-three, I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet — but your snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is, sticks by you till your grave.

The end was contained in the beginning.

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

Bad writers are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones.

It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it.

Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.