The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils.

So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.

One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death.

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.

He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed.