There were sins that were too subtle to be explained, and there were others that were too terrible to be clearly mentioned. For example, there was sex, which was always smouldering just under the surface and which suddenly blew up into a tremendous row when I was about twelve.

The process [of mass-media deception] has to be conscious, or it would not be carried out with sufficient precision, but it also has to be unconscious, or it would bring with it a feeling of falsity and hence of guilt.... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies all this is indispensably necessary.

The only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.

But the thing that I saw in your face no power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit.

Rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon - so long as there is no answer to it - gives claws to the weak.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any practical result whatsoever, you've beaten them.