“Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.”

The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.

The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.

Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.

True freedom is the right to say something that others don’t want to hear.

We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play.

Rich people are poor people with money.

Politics is the choice between the lesser of two evils.

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

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

Let’s face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism.

The object of power is power.

O wise man, wash your hands of that friend who associates with your enemies.

Always meet petulance with gentleness and perverseness with kindness. A gentle hand can lead even en elephant by a hair. Reply to thine enemy with gentleness.

Among the clergy we find our most violent enemies, those most opposed to any change in woman’s position.

Two orders of mankind are the enemies of church and state; the king without clemency, and the holy man without learning.

There is an old saying which, from its truth, has become proverbial, that friendships should be immortal, enmities mortal.

Refusing to forgive is like ingesting a lethal dose of poison and hoping it kills my enemy.

Under the influence of fear, which always leads men to take a pessimistic view of things, they magnified their enemies’ resources, and minimized their own.

He who has one enemy shall meet him everywhere.