I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you.

Perhaps it is only when people are somewhere near the starvation level that they have anything to sing about.

They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself

The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside

The Communism of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.

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.

Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.