I am a Tory anarchist. I should like everyone to go about doing just as he pleased - short of altering any of the things to which I have grown accustomed.

There is in the human race some dark spirit of recalcitrance, always pulling us in the direction contrary to that in which we are reasonably expected to go.

Good sense about trivialities is better than nonsense about things that matter.

Not philosophy, after all, not humanity, just sheer joyous power of song, is the primal thing in poetry.

Not that I had any special reason for hating school. Strange as it may seem to my readers, I was not unpopular there. I was a modest, good-humoured boy. It is Oxford that has made me insufferable.

History does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.

It is easier to confess a defect than to claim a quality.