A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

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

The birds sang, the proles sang. the Party did not sing. All round the world, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil, and in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and Japan — everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.

During the first two months of the war it was the Anarchists more than anyone else who had saved the situation, and much later than this the Anarchist militia, in spite of their indiscipline, were notoriously the best fighters among the purely Spanish forces.

it was only a hopeless fantasy, it passed like an april day, but a look and a word and the dreams they stirred they have stolen my heart away.