Let's face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.

All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?

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

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.

To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.