The main motive for nonattachment is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.

In moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one's own body.

All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.

Imperialism as he [Kipling] sees it is a sort of forcible evangelising.

In the face of pain there are no heroes.

We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation. In the face of the Thought Police there is no other way.

When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.