In places this book is a little over-written, because Mr Blunden is no more able to resist a quotation than some people are to refuse a drink.

Pessimism is reactionary because it makes the very idea of improving the world impossible.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.

No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.