Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.

. . . it is a corrupting thing to live one's real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it.

... what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be told truthfully.

Revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job.

The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.

It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except your own attitude: the predestined thing happened in any case.

A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.