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.

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?

But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

Imperialism as he [Kipling] sees it is a sort of forcible evangelising.

The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.

No one I met at this time -- doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients -- failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.