In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle, hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or laborer's cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

This life we live nowadays. It's not life, it's stagnation death-in-life. Look at all these bloody houses and the meaningless people inside them. Sometimes I think we're all corpses. Just rotting upright.

In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.

It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background.