The life of a journalist is poor, nasty, brutish and short. So is his style.

A journalist who has to borrow a typewriter is bad news.

I was removed; because I was a Communist, I was removed from leadership of the Workers’ Alliance of the CIO.

The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.

An unfulfilled vocation drains the color from a man's entire existence.

In my father's case, tragically, he was not of use.

. . . the newspapers of Utopia, he had long ago decided, would be terribly dull.

The man was such an intellectual he was of almost no use.

If I had only been able to carry my colleagues with me what we could have achieved! What a chance we had! But we threw it away. If they had only been straight enough to stand by what they had initiated, not what finally resulted from it—I am not saying that—I could have helped them. When they ran away and began to deny that they had ever had anything to do with our proposals, well, I thought to myself that politics had become too degraded for me. Do you know that they turned me out of the Labour Party with a rubber stamp? ... [W]hen I write my book on how the Labour Party betrayed Socialism I will tell the story there.

In any basic struggle for power, the intellectual man went under.

If they lacked the opportunity, the strength of their sprit would have been sapped; if they had lacked ability, the opportunity would have been wasted.

It turns out that being on the left and having actual principles isn't very profitable.

[O]ne loss in our era has been any interest in stories told from the top down.

It was less respectable because less immediately useful; and it was poorly financed since it was less profitable.