Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.
— George Orwell
The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.
A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.
At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.
As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.
For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.
To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.
The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.
Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.
Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.
War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.
Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.
Four legs good, two legs bad.
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.
There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.
I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.
Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.
The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.
Serious sport is war minus the shooting.
