A man receiving charity always hates his benefactor- it is a fixed characteristic of human nature

The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped.

But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.

She was very young...she still expected something from life, she did not understand that to push an inconvenient person over a cliff solves nothing.

We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.

On a ruinous wall I came upon a poster dating from the previous year and announcing that ‘six handsome bulls’ would be killed in the arena on such and such a date. How forlorn its faded colours looked. Where were the handsome bulls and the handsome bull-fighters now? It appeared that even in Barcelona there were hardly any bullfights nowadays - for some reason all the best matadors were Fascists.

In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.