“Knotty theological questions are the least worrying of problems to me. Why? Because they will be resolved in the hereafter, and meanwhile they can be safely shelved.”

“He believed in Communism the way most people believed in God: he would not be greatly surprised or disappointed if he turned out to be wrong, and meanwhile it made little difference to the way he lived.”

“Such talk makes you think of radiation like water in a pool: if it’s four feet high you’re safe, if it’s eight feet high you drown. But in fact radiation levels are much more like speed limits on the highway – thirty miles per hour is safer than eighty, but not as safe as twenty, and the only way to be completely safe is not to get in the car.”

“Why do you have to be the same as the others? ...Most of them are stupid.”

“Why did people manufacture trouble when there was already so much of it in the world?”

“Why was it, Lloyd wondered, that the people who wanted to destroy everything good about their country were the quickest to wave the national flag?”

“His talent was to express his readers’ most stupid and ignorant prejudices as if they made sense, so that the shameful seemed respectable. That was why they bought the paper.”