These new motor coaches ... are voluptuous, sybaritic, of doubtful morality

I doubt if even the most expensive private motors—those gigantic, three-thousand-pound machines—are as determinedly and ruthlessly comfortable as these new motor coaches. They are voluptuous, sybaritic, of doubtful morality. This is how the ancient Persian monarchs would have travelled, had they known the trick of it. If I favoured violent revolution, the sudden overthrowing and destruction of a sneering favoured class, I should be bitterly opposed to the wide use of these vehicles. They offer luxury to all but the most poverty-stricken. They have annihilated the old distinction between rich and poor traveller. No longer can the wealthy go splashing past in their private conveyances, driving the humble pedestrian against the wall, leaving him to shake his fist and curse the proud pampered crew.

J.B. Priestley, English Journey (1934), 9

Christ was a sort of an Englishman and Englishmen did not as a rule refuse to do their jobs

He doubted, however, whether Christ would have refused to manage Groby had it been his job. Christ was a sort of an Englishman and Englishmen did not as a rule refuse to do their jobs...They had not used to; now no doubt they did. It was a Russian sort of trick. He had heard that even before the revolution great Russian nobles would disperse their estates, give their serfs their liberty, put on a hair shirt and sit by the roadside begging...Something like that. Perhaps Christopher was a symptom that the English were changing. He himself was not. He was just lazy and determined—and done with it!

F.M. Ford, The last post (1928) [Parade's End], 803

You seduced a young woman in order to be able to finish your talks with her

The beastly Huns! They stood between him and Valentine Wannop. If they would go home he could be sitting talking to her for whole afternoons. That was what a young woman was for. You seduced a young woman in order to be able to finish your talks with her. You could not do that without living with her. You could not live with her without seducing her; but that was the by-product. The point is that you can't otherwise talk. You can't finish talks at street corners; in museums; even in drawing-rooms. You mayn't be in the mood when she is in the mood--for the intimate conversation that means the final communion of your souls. You have to wait together--for a week, for a year, for a lifetime, before the final intimate conversation may be attained...and exhausted. 

F.M. Ford, A man could stand up (1926) [Parade's End], 680

For I hold no man ought to refuse an honour in times like these ... because it is like slapping the sovereign in the face

'...But as it is I propose to refuse it and ask for a knighthood, if it won't too sicken you to have me a Sir...For I hold no man ought to refuse an honour in times like these, as has been done by certain sickening intellectuals, because it is like slapping the sovereign in the face and bound to hearten the other side, which no doubt was what was meant by those fellows.'

F.M. Ford, No more parades (1925) [Parade's End], 456

the Almighty as, on a colossal scale, a great English Landowner, benevolently awful, a colossal duke who never left his study and was thus invisible

Tietjens had walked in the sunlight down the lines, past the hut with the evergreen climbing rose, in the sunlight, thinking in an interval good humouredly about his official religion: about the Almighty as, on a colossal scale, a great English Landowner, benevolently awful, a colossal duke who never left his study and was thus invisible, but knowing all about the estate down to the last hind at the home farm and the last oak: Christ, an almost too benevolent Land-Steward, son of the Owner, knowing all about the estate down to the last child at the porter's lodge, apt to be got round by the more detrimental tenants: the Third Person of the Trinity, the spirit of the estate, the Game as it were, as distinct from the players of the game: the atmosphere of the estate, that of the interior of Winchester Cathedral just after a Handel anthem has been finished, a perpetual Sunday, with, probably, a little cricket for the young men. 

... 

It was probably done with. Along with cricket. There would be no more parades of that sort. Probably they would play some beastly yelping game...Like baseball or Association football...And heaven?...Oh, it would be a revival meeting on a Welsh hillside. Or Chautauqua, wherever that was...And God? A Real Estate Agent, with Marxist views.

F.M. Ford, No more parades (1925) [Parade's End], 394