Inside the Whale and Other Essays quotes

Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing.

If men would behave decently the world would be decent.

All art is propaganda. Neither Dickens himself nor the majority of Victorian novelists would have thought of denying this. On the other hand, not all propaganda is art.

…the face of a man who is generously angry—in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.

But notice the phrase 'necessary murder'. It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word.

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

The whale's belly is simply a womb big enough for an adult.

Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles.

The year is 1910—or 1940, but it is all the same.