Every life viewed from the inside is a series of defeats.

Every war, when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has a man invented that even approaches in cruelty some of the commoner diseases? 'Natural' death, almost by defintion, means something slow, smelly and painful.

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

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

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.