“All that is needed is money and a candidate who can be coached to look sincere. Political principles and plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The personality of the candidate, the way he is projected by the advertising experts, are the things that really matter.”

Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly — they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.

The question of the next generation will not be one of how to liberate the masses, but rather, how to make them love their servitude.

People often ask me what is the most effective technique for transforming their life. It is a little embarrassing that after years and years of research and experimentation, I have to say that the best answer is – just be a little kinder.

One believes things because one has been conditioned to believe them.

If you don’t gamble, you’ll never win.

The pleasures of ignorance are as great, in their way, as the pleasures of knowledge.

Liberty, as we all know, cannot flourish in a country that is permanently on a war footing, or even a near war footing. Permanent crisis justifies permanent control of everybody and everything by the agencies of central government.

You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you mad.

Reality cannot be ignored except at a price; and the longer the ignorance is persisted in, the higher and more terrible becomes the price that must be paid.

If human beings were shown what they’re really like, they’d either kill one another as vermin, or hang themselves.

Ignore death up to the last moment; then, when it can’t be ignored any longer, have yourself squirted full of morphia and shuffle off in a coma. Thoroughly sensible, humane and scientific, eh?

Armaments, universal debt, and planned obsolescence – those are the three pillars of Western prosperity. If war, waste, and moneylenders were abolished, you’d collapse. And while you people are overconsuming the rest of the world sinks more and more deeply into chronic disaster.

Round pegs in square holes tend to have dangerous thoughts about the social system and tend to infect others with their discontents.

I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.

There seems to be no good reason why a thoroughly scientific dictatorship should ever be overthrown.

The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.

I think it is embarrassing to all of us who truly know the mission of the Refugee Act.

The fan base that I’ve had all these years has come along.

I think the trick with knowledge is to “acquire it, and forget all except the perfume” – because it is noisy and sometimes drowns out one’s own “brain voices”.

Who you truly are is a place of no particular thing, but all things at once.

Tugay is writhing around all over the place as if he were dead

I’ve always argued that this country has benefited immensely from the fact that we draw people from all over the world.

George had taken off all ten of his fingers and tied them into a bundle with what appeared to be either his own small intestines.

All I ever wanted to be was a traveler and explorer.