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Dr Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in which none of his patients had died or got any worse.
Maximum agony. Pour encourager les autres.
God knows, one is only young once, but in her case it was once too often.
It was not their fault that I was made into a thespian.
I learned to be more lonely than it ought to be possible to feel.
It was common knowledge that the Yugoslavs hated each other more than they could ever hate a foreigner or an invader.
The two men who murdered the ‘patriot’ Hoggia apparently poisoned him and then cut off his head, which is mild indeed by Albanian standards.
We should care for each other more than we care for ideas,
‘Germany is taking everything, the Italians are playing the fool, the French have run away, the Belgians have been overrun whilst they were looking the other way, the Poles have been charging tanks with cavalry, the Americans have been playing baseball, the British have been drinking tea and adjusting their monocles, the Russians have been sitting on their hands except when voting unanimously to do whatever they are told.
He was a prodigal mine of fashionable slogans like ‘A book in one hand and a gun in the other’,
can you trust someone who replies immediately, without thought? Someone whose actions and words are poetic rather than solidly cogitated?
her heart grow heavy, reflecting that in the old days men were the playthings of the gods, and had advanced no further than to become the toys of other men who thought that they themselves were gods.
the sparks drifted to earth in slow motion like the souls of reluctant angels.
to be associated with the British is to be offered the choice of one of two bags tied at the neck with string. One contains a viper, and the other a bag of gold. If you are lucky you will choose the bag of gold, only to find that the British have reserved the right to exchange it for the other without notice.
‘Symmetry is only a property of dead things. Did you ever see a tree or a mountain that was symmetrical? It’s fine for buildings, but if you ever see a symmetrical human face, you will have the impression that you ought to think it beautiful, but that in fact you find it cold.
‘You have to be firm with these people, or they start doing what they like. They’re full of false consciousness, and it’s just something that we have to get out of them, in their own interests.
Philosophers who have only one idea and propound it in barbarous neologisms in thirty successive volumes have a guaranteed future in the universities,
In Britain, instead of sensibly moving the capital to York, London was allowed to grow into the vilest human cesspit in the history of the world.
Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away,
And in any case, barbarians have always been convenient; we have usually had someone else to blame for our catastrophes.
He was oppressed by an enfeebling sense of futility and melancholy,
The irony was that if the Communists had continued their wartime policy of doing absolutely nothing, they would undoubtedly have become the first freely elected Communist government in the world.
the Greek Communists made themselves permanently unelectable because even Communists could not bring themselves to vote for them.
Communism was growing into the Greatest and Most Humane Ideology Never to Have Been Implemented Even When it Was in Power, or perhaps The Most Noble Cause Ever to Attract the Highest Proportion of Hooligans and Opportunists.
The party is never wrong. Whoever is not with us is against us.’
Nye Bevan once said something similar.
He had struggled for a better world, and wrecked it.
it was her own fault; she was reaping the inevitable whirlwind consequent upon having taught the girl to think.
