"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"
"Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism"
"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"
"Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent"
"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"
"Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing"
"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"
"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"
"Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind"
"There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them"
"The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history"
"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it"
"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"
"The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time"
"The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth"
"So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot"
"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf"
"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act"
"Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible"
"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past"
"When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic"
"Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion"
"To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization"
"We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men"
"On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time"
"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"
"In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible"
"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"
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act"
"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"
"The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor"
"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"
"The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent"
"The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded"
"Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious"
"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever"
"War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent"
"The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection"
"Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards"
