All writers who can claim to be called 'living' must be political in a sense. They must have what the Quakers call a concern to understand what is happening in the world, and must engage themselves, in their writing, to promote no comfortable lies, of the sort which people will pay well to be told rather than the truth.

Nationalism will keep its venom until we succeed in creating an image of the nations of the whole world as so many provinces.

You can't argue with a raging want. You can, but it is useless.

Language is one of the thin walls humanity has built up over centuries against its own bestial and destructive impulses.

One of the uncovenanted benefits of living for a long time is that, having so many more dead than living friends, death can appear as a step backwards into the joyous past.

In what touches their social convictions, most persons do not think. The threat of change, with all it suggests to them in the loss of social and economic privilege, alarms so deeply that they are incapable of unprejudiced thought. They seem to themselves to be thinking, with lucidity and fairness, but since they start from the conviction that change must undoubtedly be for the worse or from settled grief at the thought of losing what is old and lovely, they are doing no more than following a logical sequence of ideas from a false premise.

a writer's first duty is to be clear. Clarity is an excellent virtue. Like all virtues it can be pursued at ruinous cost. Paid, so far as I am concerned, joyfully.