Alarm bells ring when a politician stands haughty upon his honour.

You can imprison but you can't enslave a man who argues with his books.

A writer should never allow himself to be lulled out of the vigilance native to his profession.

If we doubt the power of literature and art to civilise, how come no one has ever been mugged by a person carrying a well-thumbed copy of 'Middlemarch' in his back pocket?

If the Jew transmogrified into the Devil for the medieval church, he retained his devilish characteristics as Christian sentiment found other places to express itself, early socialism being one of them.

Trump can be damned to all hell with his enclosed little world in which no thought is possible. But it's the encouraging of half the people of America and many more besides to hate words, hate what words can do, hate thought, hate the liberal, the sophisticated, the metropolitan. It's anger-making.