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

Where this age differs from those immediately preceding it is that a liberal intelligentsia is lacking. Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion, and such truisms as that a machine-gun is still a machine-gun even when a "good" man is squeezing the trigger have turned into heresies which it is actually becoming dangerous to utter.

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

There is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.

Fate seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes.

We have become too civilized to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those who don't take the sword perish by smelly diseases.

The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.