No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.

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.

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.