"You and I can make a mistake. Not the Party. The Party, comrade, is more than you and I and a thousand others like you and I."

History is a priori amoral; it has no conscience.

To sell oneself for thirty pieces of silver is an honest transaction; but to sell oneself to one s own conscience is to abandon mankind.

Every error has its consequences and venges itself unto the seventh generation.

History knows no scruples and no hesitation. Inert and unerring, she flows towards her goal. At every bend in her course she leaves the mud which she carries and the corpses of the drowned.

Snobbery is not merely a silly human weakness but something basic in the mentality of modern man-a symptom which reflects the general sickness, the dislocation of social and cultural values in contemporary civilization.

He had learned that every known physical pain was bearable; if one knew beforehand exactly what was going to happen to one, one stood it as a surgical operation-for instance, the extraction of a tooth.

To want to meet an author because you like his books is as ridiculous as wanting to meet the goose because you like pate de foie gras.

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.

God seems to have left the receiver off the hook, and time is running out.