how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature?

it is a matter of daring just as much as of technique—to expose the imbecilities of the inner mind,

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

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is

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. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer.

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.

But read him for five pages, ten pages, and you feel the peculiar relief that comes not so much from understanding as from being understood. "He knows all about me," you feel; "he wrote this specially for me." It is as though you could hear a voice speaking to you, a friendly American voice, with no humbug in it, no moral purpose, merely an

The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped.

In a tropical landscape one's eye takes in everything except the human beings.