Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.
Political language-and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists–is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.
Political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.
Patriotism is usually stronger than class-hatred, and always stronger than any kind of internationalism.
Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child’s eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.
One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.