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.