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

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.

Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn’t matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

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.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments

In the face of pain there are no heroes.

There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.

If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.

The way to make a million dollars is to start a religion.

I believe in life you need to always ask for everything politely and nicely, and then if they say no you do what you wanted to do anyway

Government ought to be all outside and no inside. Everybody knows that corruption thrives in secret places, and avoids public places, and we believe it a fair presumption that secrecy means impropriety.

I think I need a psychiatrist because I do believe I am mentally disturbed in some way.

I do not believe in starving myself.

Only those who believe attempt the seemingly impossible.

If you believe Jesus ever had a good word for war or torture or tax cuts for the rich, or raping the earth, or refusing water to dying migrants, then you might as well believe bunnies lay painted eggs.

Clown’ was written when I couldn’t find anyone who believed in me as an artist. Maybe those labels will think twice next time a young songwriter comes along.

One should believe in marriage as in the immortality of the soul.