Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on–that is, badly.
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.
To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on–that is, badly.
On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.
If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, “I’m a free man in here” – he tapped his forehead – “and you’re all right.
One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think, as I thought then, that it is better to die violently and not too old.
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.
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?
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.