All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers.

He loved Big Brother.

Fate seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes.

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?

Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.

The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money frees people from work.

Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn't do the hangman's job.