“Everyone who is not happy must be shot.”

“Yet it's not for want of future that I'm here, he thought. It's for want of a present.”

“Tessa distinguished absolutely between pain observed and pain shared. Pain observed is journalistic pain. Its diplomatic pain. Its television pain, over as soon as you switch off your beastly set. ...”

“Wives?" she asked, interrupting him. For a moment, he had assumed she was tuning to the novel. Then he saw her waiting, suspicious eyes, so he replied cautiously, "None active," as if wives were vo...”

“This is a war," Lemas replied. "It's graphic and unpleasant because it's fought on a tiny scale, at close range; fought with a wastage of innocent life sometimes, I admit. But it's nothing, nothing...”

“I would say that since the war, our methods-out and those of the opposition-have become much the same. I mean you can't be less ruthless than the opposition simply because your government's 'policy...”

“First reach your target in your mind, then reaching your target in reality will just be a formality!”

“To dream in doctrines, how tidy!”

“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection”

“I read once that the ancient Egyptians had fifty words for sand & the Eskimos had a hundred words for snow. I wish I had a thousand words for love, but all that comes to mind is the way you move ag...”

“Romance is the glamour which turns the dust of everyday life into a golden haze. ”

“When everything is a law, nothing is a law.”

“Accumulating orthodoxy makes it harder year-by-year to be a Christian than it was in Jesus' day.”

“No man is such a legalist as the good Secularist.”