One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up.

Creativity is the defeat of habit by originality.

...the temptation, which consisted of a single word written on the cemetary of the defeated: Sleep.

When a person identifies himself with a group his critical faculties are diminished and his passions enhanced by a kind of emotive resonance. The individual is not a killer, the group is, and by identifying with it, the individual becomes one. This is the infernal dialect reflected in man's history.

[My father] loved me tenderly and shyly from a distance, and later on took a naive pride in seeing my name in print.

The Régime did not want Communists; it wanted robots. It will take at least a generation to change them back into humans again.

I went to Communism as one goes to a spring of fresh water, and I left Communism as one clambers out of a poisoned river strewn with the wreckage of flooded cities and the corpses of the drowned.