You're not trying to find the answer to a question, you're simply trying to confirm something you desperately want to believe: that everyone is evil.

Anyone who loves in the expectation of being loved in return is wasting their time.

Whenever you want to achieve something, keep your eyes open, concentrate and make sure you know exactly what it is you want. No one can hit their target with their eyes closed.

Man needs what's worst in him in order to achieve what's best in him.

There are two kinds of idiots - those who don't take action because they have received a threat, and those who think they are taking action because they have issued a threat.

Love, too, was just a question of time

Because you believed I was capable of behaving decently, I did.

And one more thing: you still believe that man can be good. If that weren't the case, you wouldn't have invented all this nonsense to convince yourself otherwise.

They were so ignorant, so naive, so resigned to their lot. They refused to believe anything that didn't fit in with what they were used to believing.

Even God has a hell: his love of Mankind.

Men who have nothing to lose never give a thought for eternal life.

The stretching of your faith is immediate pain that results in ultimate gain. It is in the waiting that we become who we are meant to be.

You know you are getting older when "happy hour" is a nap.

We have discovered that the scheme of 'outlawing war' has made war more like an outlaw without making it less frequent and that to banish the knight does not alleviate the suffering of the peasant.

I was essentially paid to perpetuate the myth that we are all, or should at least try to be, 17 and a size 2 forever.

Jealousy is sustained as often by pride as by affection.

It is difficult to express the reality of Ibo society in classical English.

Man, as the minister and interpreter of nature, is limited in act and understanding by his observation of the order of nature; neither his understanding nor his power extends further.

She loved him, though not at this particular moment.

The reason I never want a book to end is that I start to feel like the characters are my friends. I'll miss them when they're gone.

The healthy being craves an occasional wildness, a jolt from normality, a sharpening of the edge of appetite, his own little festival of Saturnalia, a brief excursion from his way of life.