Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.
— George Orwell
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.
If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?
One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.
The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
Liberal: a power worshipper without power.
In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
Big Brother is watching you.
It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.
Good writing is like a windowpane.
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.
I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
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.
Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.
When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.
Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
