All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

Most people here agree that the rhetoric got overblown on both sides of the Atlantic before the Iraq war, and it was a disagreement among friends over the timing, not the substance, of the Iraq war.

We're not losing the peace.

I live in peace.

When people don't understand that the government doesn't have their interests in mind, they're more susceptible to go to war.