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

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.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

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.

Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.

Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey.

All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.