Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.
It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.
To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one’s lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.
Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.
In moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one’s own body.
Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated.
The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.
International football is the continuation of war by other means.
All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery.
Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes.
Football, a game in which everyone gets hurt and every nation has its own style of play which seems unfair to foreigners.
Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn’t do the hangman’s job.
In my opinion nothing has contributed more to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country.
The tendency of advanced capitalism has been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out, as it once seemed likely to do.
People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has a man invented that even approaches in cruelty some of the commoner diseases? ‘Natural’ death, almost by defintion, means something slow, smelly and painful.
But the thing that I saw in your face no power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit.
A humanitarian is always a hypocrite.
I loathed the game, and since I could see no pleasure or usefulness in it, it was very difficult for me to show courage at it. Football, it seemed to me, is not really played for the pleasure of kicking a ball about, but is a species of fighting.
To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armour, the apostles of martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous.
One of the effects of a safe and civilized life is an immense over sensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions somewhat disgusting.