If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
Those who abjure violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.
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.