A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.' 'Why not?' 'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.

They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening

Preventive war is a crime not easily committed by a country that retains any traces of democracy.

All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are 'enlightened' all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our 'enlightenment,' demands that the robbery shall continue.

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.

The one certain thing was that death never came at an expected moment.