Four legs gooood, two legs baaad!

The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.

It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.

Is the English press honest or dishonest? At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news. Yet I do not suppose there is one paper in England that can be straightforwardly bribed with hard cash. In the France of the Third Republic all but a very few of the newspapers could notoriously be bought over the counter like so many pounds of cheese.

The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.

His answer to every problem, every setback was “I will work harder!” —which he had adopted as his personal motto.

The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.