It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.

Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does.

If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, "I'm a free man in here" - he tapped his forehead - "and you're all right.

The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.

they say that time heals all things, they say you can always forget; but the smiles and the tears across the years they twist my heart strings yet!

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.