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

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

When I see a policeman with a club beating a man on the ground, I don’t have to ask whose side I’m on.

He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

Despotic governments can stand ‘moral force’ till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four.

The only good human being is a dead one.

The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.

News is something somebody doesn’t want printed; all else is advertising.

Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them.

On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

Hatred is so much easier to win than love – and so much harder to get rid of.

I use charcoal a lot. Partly because it has such a fantastic range but also because it is very easy to erase.

I had to discover very quickly that class origins cannot be erased, regardless of whether we climb up or down the sociocultural ladder.

I know I’m a different person. But nothing can erase that era, those times, those memories, those fights to get ‘Roc-A-fella’ where it was.

Life is like writing with a pen. You can cross out your past but you can’t erase it.

We should not be flying a flag of a group who wants to erase our history and bring mass destruction to our country through Communism.

Memories, all those little experiences make up the fabric of our lives and on balance, I wouldn’t want to erase any of them, tempting though it may be.

My heart is at ease knowing that what was meant for me will never miss me, and that what misses me was never meant for me.