We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull.
Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip.
The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.
All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth.
After 40, a man is responsible for his face.
I believe that the BBC, in spite of the stupidity of its foreign propaganda and the unbearable voices of its announcers, is very truthful. It is generally regarded here as more reliable than the press.
For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?
His answer to every problem, every setback was “I will work harder!” – which he had adopted as his personal motto.
You must be an intellectual. A normal person would never believe a thing like that.
Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks the whip. But the really well-trained dog is the one that turns somersaults when there is no whip-.
Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose.
Power is not a means; it is an end.
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.
One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.
Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.
If there really is such a thing as turning in one’s grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.
Tragedy, he precieved, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.
No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.
He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed.