I'll read, and then I'll take naps. When I feel sleep coming on, I give in and don't fight it.

The nation in arms is virtually a communist state: the people must be paid wages and fed and protected and regimented behind the lines as much as on the front. Minds must be kept loyal and at the right pitch of hate, so that successive drafts of fighters are accepted without murmurings. Letters and newspapers must be censored while the propaganda mill grinds on. As for decisions of strategy and overall command, they must please many masters: dissenters in the cabinet, the heads of the allied states and public opinion. Hence failures must be disguised or concealed.

Maxims in times of danger are useless, experience is incommunicable. The knotted strands of life, desire, assumptions, and moral codes cannot be unsnarled; they can only be cut, which is what happens when an air raid occurs, with a silencing fortissimo like the finale of a Beethoven symphony.

For the educated, the authority of science rested on the strictness of its methods; for the mass, it rested on the powers of explanation.

Simple English is no one’s mother tongue. It has to be worked for.

Above all, do not talk yourself out of good ideas by trying to expound them at haphazard meetings.

In any assembly the simplest way to stop transacting business and split the ranks is to appeal to a principle.