Freedom is 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.

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

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.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

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.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

Four legs good, two legs bad.

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.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.

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?

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

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.

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.

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.