On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
No book is genuinely free from political bias.
Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception.
Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.
Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.
Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery.
It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.
It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one’s own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it: consequently the defenders of every kind of régime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.