The new world that Mr Hulton wants is, broadly speaking, the kind of world that every sensible man wants, but the comparative powerlessness of sensible men is something that he is inclined to ignore. p. 15
.. But the position of someone who is a Socialist by allegiance and a Liberal by temperament is not easy .. Economic insecurity can be abolished at the price of handling society over to a new race of oligarchs. This is not in itself an argument against the Soviet system, for it may well be that the Western conceptions of liberty and democracy are worthless. But if they are not worthless, then certain features in Russian policy are not defensible. One cannot have it both ways. p. 92
.. and the time when it might have been useful to point out that Franco was the friend of our enemies was in 1936. .. In so far as books influence events, Professor Peers must be held to have done something towards establishing Franco's regime, and he ought not now to be astonished because Franco has behaved in very much the manner that every supporter of the Republic foretold at the time. p. 96
His great fault is lack of variation - a quality that one might, perhaps, call wateriness, since it gives one the feeling of drinking draught after draught of spring water, wonderfully pure and refreshing, but somehow turning one's mind in the direction of whisky after the first pint or two. p. 97
Marxism may possibly be a mistaken theory, but it is a useful instrument for testing other systems of thought, rather like one of those long-handled hammers with which they tap the wheels of locomotives. Tap! Is this wheel cracked? Tap! Is this writer a bourgeois? A crude question, ignoring much based on the principle of Cui Bono and assuming in advance that you know what is meant by Bono: and yet it is surprising how often a pretentious book will seem suddenly hollow if you apply to it the simple question: Does this writer, or does he not, take account of the economic basis of society?
If democracy means popular rule, it is absurd to call Britain democratic. It is a plutocracy haunted by the ghost of a caste system. But if democracy means a society in which you can safely go into the nearest pub and utter your true opinion of the Government, then Britain is democratic. In any country two things are of fundamental importance: its economic structure and its history.
[about the next book: ] .. and is aware that the spirit matters more than the forms. p. 102-103
[Dickens] .. Mrs Gamp was a luxury that society might well do without, ..
Yet the man who could write this stuff could also record the conversations of Bailey, and could not only create Mrs Gamp but could throw in, just for good measure, the metaphysical puzzle, Mrs Harris.
.. Dickens’s habit of telling small lies in order to emphasize what he regards as a big truth. Volume 3, p. 117
.. the various parts of Martin Chuzzlewit have not much more relationship to one another than the sounds produced by a cat walking across the piano. p. 17
.. and one can see the result in the unrealistic way in which strategic questions are often discussed. p. 36
Quite new, too, is the doubt cast by the various totalitarian systems on the very existence of objective truth, and the consequent large-scale falsification of history. .. The real problem of our time is to restore the sense of absolute right and wrong when the belief that it used to rest on - that is, the belief in personal immortality - has been destroyed. p. 107
Mr Leon shows such an implacable holstility for the wretched Countess Tolstoy, for by assuming that in every disagreement the Countess must have been in the wrong he avoids discussion of one of the most difficult problems of a writer's life - the conflict between the literary and the private personality or, to put it differently; between love of humanity and ordinary decency. p. 112,
Yet each writer is convinced that the other's policy leads directly to slavery, and the alarming thing is that they may both be right. ..
The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them. ..
[Professor Hayek] does not see, or will not admit, that a return to 'free' competition means for the great mass of people a tyranny probably worse, because more irresponsible, than that of the State. The trouble with competitions is that somebody wins them. Professor Hayek denies that free capitalism necessarily leads to monopoly, but in practice that is where it has led, and since the vast majority of people would far rather have State regimentation than slumps and unemployment, the drift towards collectivism is bound to continue if popular opinion has any say in the matter. ..
The thing Mr Zilliacus leaves out of account is that wars have results, irrespective of the motives of those who precipitate them.
Between them these two books sum up our present predicament. Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets, and war. Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war. There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can be somehow combined with the freedom of the intellect, which can only happen if the concept of right and wrong is restored to politics. p. 114
The complete victory won by the North left the business men in control, and the moral atmosphere of the United States deteriorated accordingly. ..
On the other hand, Mr Kingsmill's debunking of Cromwell.. this prototype of all the modern dictators, who perpetrated massacres which make the German exploits at Lidice look like a schoolgirls' romp. p. 116-7
.. but it is astonishing how few of the contributors give the impression of writing about the actual world in which we are now living. ..
The truly sinister phenomena of our time are the atomisation of the world, the increasing power of nationalism, the worship of leaders who are credited with divine powers, the crushing, not only of freedom of thought but of the concept of objective truth, and the tendency towards oligarchical rule based on forced labour. That is the direction in which the world is changing, and it is the failure to discuss these subject that makes it hard to take this book seriously. p. 118-119
True civilisation, Gill thinks, can only return when people choose their own work and do it in their own time, and when they are conscious of being free agents while possessing a common body of belief. p. 128
The author's simplicity of outlook is an advantage to him as a narrator. p. 155
The author wants his comforts and privileges, and is ashamed of wanting them: he feels that he has a right to them, and yet feels certain that they are doomed to disappear. p. 158
.. when one of his lost causes happened to win after all, he tended to lose all interest in it.
.. He was at once courageous, civilised, and intellectually honest p. 161
To admire the English as much as Conrad did, one had to be a foreigner, seeing the English with fresh eyes and slightly misunderstanding them. p. 166
.. when men stop worshipping God they promptly start worshipping Man, with disastrous results. p. 171
.. the BBC is a semi-official organisation .. subject to interference from all kinds of busybodies who raise an outcry whenever they overhear a programme which strikes them as too intelligent. p. 172
[Chinese proverbs] do not have the crude earthy quality of European proverbs, the aim of which is usually to puncture fine attitudes. p. 184
.. and one could play the fool with good conscience. p. 186
Some of what he says is shallow and unfair, and too much coloured by the assumption that civilisation exists in order to produce works of art. p. 188
.. modern men can neither stop worshipping Science nor imagine a genuine scientific civilisation. p. 188
We are to have a planned, rationalised world with no wastage, no exploitation, no disorder, no poverty, no gross inequalities - .. But at the same time the State is not to be an end in itself, and there is to be the most complete freedom of thought so long as it does not issue in open rebellion. p. 190
She writes nearly always about hopeless, decaying people, .. not about people who have a definite purpose and are acting on it. p. 194
To act with firmness and daring in moments of danger, to right injustices, to be a domination personality, to exercise fascination on the opposite sex and to horsewhip one's private enemies - these things are more easily achieved on paper than in real life. p. 197
The world is going in a certain direction that he does not like, but he is unable to think of any other direction in which it could actually be induced to go. p. 199
He ends by stating that while the coalowners must in no circumstances be allowed to remain in control of the industry the miners are not capable of running it either. p. 203
However, human beings vary in their notion of what constitutes pleasure, .. p. 220
Only a few decades after Marx's death the Russian Revolution broke out, and the men who guided its course proclaimed themselves, and believed themselves, to be Marx's most faithful disciples. But their success really depended on throwing a good deal of their master's teaching overboard.
Marx had foretold that revolution would happen first in the highly industrialised countries. It is now clear that this was an error, but he was right in this sense, that the kind of revolution that he foresaw could not happen in a backward country like Russia, where the industrial workers were a minority. Marx had envisaged an overwhelmingly powerful proletariat sweeping aside a small group of opponents, and then governing democratically through elected representatives. What actually happened, in Russia, was the seizure of power by a small body of classless professional revolutionaries, who claimed to represent the common people but were not chosen by them nor genuinely answerable to them.
From Lenin's point of view this was unavoidable. he and his group had to stay in power since they alone were the true inheritors of the Marxist doctrine, and it was obvious that they could not stay in power democratically. The 'dictatorship of the proletariat' had to mean the dicatorship of a handful of intellectuals ruling through terrorism. The Revolution was saved, but from then onwards the Russian Communist Party developed in a direction of which Lenin would probably have disapproved if he had lived longer.
Placed as they were, the Russian Communists necessarily developed intoa permanent ruling caste or oligarchy, recruited not by birth but by adoption. Since they could not risk the growth of opposition, they could not permit genuine criticism and since they silenced criticism they often made avoidable mistakes; then, because they could not admit that the mistakes were their own, they had to find scapegoats, sometimes on an enormous scale. p. 72-73
The trouble with transitional periods is that the harsh outlook which they generate tends to become permanent. .. A dictatorship supposedly established for a limited purpose has dug itself in and Socialism comes to be thought of as meaning concentration camps and secret police forces. p. 76
