So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.

When you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for this reason that I don't mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met and spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to feel any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel I ought to - like the Labour M.P.s who get patted on the back by dukes and are lost forever more.

It had never occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work til it was coarse in the grain like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful. But is was so, and after all, he thought, why not?

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.