You're only a rebel from the waist downwards,' he told her.

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.

During the first two months of the war it was the Anarchists more than anyone else who had saved the situation, and much later than this the Anarchist militia, in spite of their indiscipline, were notoriously the best fighters among the purely Spanish forces.

Man's greatest drive is not love or hate but to change another person's writing.

The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions - racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war - which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.

When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash.