On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

• In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
• Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
• The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
• 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.
• I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.
• No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
• A family with the wrong members in control that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
• It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime 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.
• We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
• Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.