No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.
There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.
When you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for this reason that I don't mix much in literary...
When it comes to the pinch human beings are heroic.
At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness," O'Brien had said to him. He knew what it meant, or thought he knew. The place where there is no darkness was the imagined future, which one woul...
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...
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
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.
Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very...
There were only four dissentients, the three dogs and the cat, who was afterwards discovered to have voted on both sides.
The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
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 .
To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.