The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.

Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.

It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children

You must be an intellectual. A normal person would never believe a thing like that.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside

I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

Before the war, and especially before the Boer War, it was summer all the year round.

Human beings were behaving as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.

I have the most evil memories of Spain, but I have very few bad memories of Spaniards.

Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.

I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.

We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.

Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death.

Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn't do the hangman's job.

It was soon noticed that when ever there was work to be done the cat could never be found.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.

There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word-- Man

The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.

Pessimism is reactionary because it makes the very idea of improving the world impossible.

Anyone who knows of a provable instance of colour discrimination ought always to expose it.

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

All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers.

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99 % of the population exist.

Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.

Winston Churchill could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war.

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.

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

Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.

The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned.

There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter.

Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose

If I had understood the situation a bit better I should probably have joined the Anarchists.

There are some situations from which one can only escape by acting like a devil or a lunatic.

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

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