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.

When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack on morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise.

Imperialism as he [Kipling] sees it is a sort of forcible evangelising.

England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation, even among people who should and do know better.

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.

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 squirting out ink.

One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death.