It's a sad day when you find out that it's not accident or time or fortune, but just yourself that kept things from you.

Intellectuals can tell themselves anything, sell themselves any bill of goods, which is why they were so often patsies for the ruling classes in 19th-century France and England, or 20th-century Russia and America.

Childhood is less clear to me than to many people: when it ended I turned my face away from it for no reason that I know about, certainly without the usual reason of unhappy memories. For many years that worried me, but then I discovered that the tales of former children are seldom to be trusted. Some people supply too many past victories or pleasures with which to comfort themselves, and other people cling to pains, real and imagined, to excuse what they have become.

One sits uncomfortably on a too comfortable cushion.

You do too much. Go and do nothing for a while. Nothing.

Like all former thinkers, I'm writing a book.

For every man who lives without freedom, the rest of us must face the guilt.