A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things.

To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.

Politically, Swift was one of those people who are driven into a sort of perverse Toryism by the follies of the progressive party of the moment.

The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped.

We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future.

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics'. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.