One of the great weaknesses of the progressive, as distinct from the religious, mind, is that it has no awareness of truth as such; only of truth in … - Malcolm Muggeridge

I wonder whether, in the history of all the civilisations that have ever been, a more insanely optimistic notion has ever been entertained than that you and I, mortal, puny creatures, may yet aspire, with God’s grace and Christ’s help, to be reborn into what St Paul calls the glorious liberty of the children of God. Or if there was ever a more abysmally pessimistic one than that we, who reach out with our minds and our aspirations to the stars and beyond, should be able so to arrange our lives, so to eat and drink and fornicate and learn and frolic, that our brief span in this world fulfils all our hopes and desires.

If I get to Heaven, which I very much doubt, I will ask of God just one thing, and that is to send Shakespeare back down to earth, and make him sit a University of Madras examination in Shakespeare, just for the pleasure of watching him failing the exam.

There were soldiers everywhere... They were well fed and the civilian population was obviously starving. I mean starving in its absolute sense; not undernourished as, for instance, most Oriental peasants are undernourished and some unemployed workers in Europe, but having had for weeks next to nothing to eat. Later I found out that there had been no bread at all in the place for three months, and such for as there was I saw for myself in the market. The only edible thing on the lowest European standards was chicken -- about five chickens, fifteen roubles each. No one was buying. Where would a peasant get fifteen roubles? For the most part – the few that remain – are sold at the railway stations to passengers on their way to the mountains in the south for a holiday or for a rest cure in a sanatorium. The rest of the food offered for sale was revolting and would be thought unfit, in the ordinary way to be offered to animals. (...) "How are things with you?" I asked one man. He looked around anxiously to see no soldiers were about. "We have nothing, absolutely nothing. They have taken everything away," he said and hurried on. This is what I heard again and again and again. (...) It was true. They had nothing. It was also true that everything had been taken away. The famine is an organised one.