To talk, simply to talk! It sounds so little, and how much it is! When you have existed to the brink of middle age in bitter loneliness, among people to whom your true opinion on every subject on earth is blasphemy, the need to talk is the greatest of all needs.

The heresy of heresies was common sense.

Pessimism is reactionary because it makes the very idea of improving the world impossible.

We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.

You must be an intellectual. A normal person would never believe a thing like that.

I watched him [a 'fat Russian agent'] with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies -- unless one counts journalists.

Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.