“All art is the struggle to be, in a particular sort of way, virtuous.”

“Any scientific treatment of the history of art must encompass not only the concepts of ‘social class’ and ‘class struggle, but also all the terms which describe particular social groups such as social category, autonomous fraction of a class, fraction of a class, and social stratum.”

“We do not wait for inspiration. We work because we've jolly well got to. But when all is said and done, we toil at this particular job because it's turned out to be our particular job, and in a weird sort of way I suppose we may be said to like it.”

“Incentives to virtuous energy are a sort of moon to the moral world. Their borrowed light is but a dimmer substitute for the life-giving rays of religion.”

“The classification of subject matter may be carried out for all sort of special purposes - to arrange books on shelves, to group inventions in patents, to classify the raw materials, intermediates and products of importance to a particular manufacturer, and so on. All such arrangements have their particular uses and their particular problems.”

“In democracy, it's a continuing struggle of convincing the other person to see things the way you do. You may succeed in doing that during one particular election then fail in the next.”

“People are locked up in all sorts of ways.”

“A man who has nothing in particular to recommend him discusses all sorts of subjects at random as though he knew everything.”

“This struggle must be organised, according to “all the rules of the art”, by people who are professionally engaged in revolutionary activity.”

“The function of art is to struggle against obligation.”