Serious sport is war minus the shooting.
In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.
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.
Big Brother is watching you.
Good writing is like a windowpane.
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
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.
War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
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.
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.
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.
The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.