It is not primarily ideas that have a history it is societies. And then what often seem opposed ideas can in the end be seen as parts of a single social process.

We all like to think of ourselves as a standard, and I can see that it is genuinely difficult for the English middle class to suppose that the working class is not desperately anxious to become just like itself. I am afraid this must be unlearned.

The human crisis is always a crisis of understanding: what we genuinely understand we can do.

What is often being argued, it seems to me, in the idea of nature is the idea of man and this not only generally, or in ultimate ways, but the idea of man in society, indeed the ideas of kinds of societies.

It wasn't idealism that made me, from the beginning, want a more secure and rational society. It was an intellectual judgment, to which I still hold. When I was young its name was socialism. We can be deflected by names. But the need was absolute, and is still absolute.

Most works of art are effectively treated as commodities and most artists, even when they justly claim quite other intentions, areeffectively treated as a category of independent craftsmen or skilled workers producing a certain kind of marginal commodity.

Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language.

The gap between our feelings and our social observation is dangerously wide.

A very large part of English middle-class education is devoted to the training of servants...In so far as it is, by definition, the training of upper servants, it includes, of course, the instilling of that kind of confidence which will enable the upper servants to supervise and direct the lower servants.

To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair inevitable.

The idea of nature contains, though often unnoticed, an extraordinary amount of human history.

Every aspect of personal life is radically affected by the quality of general life, and yet the general life is seen at its most important in completely personal terms.

The real dividing line between things we call work and the things we call leisure is that in leisure, however active we may be, we make our own choices and our own decisions. We feel for the time being that our life is our own.