Everything Quotes

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

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.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

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 schizophrenia.

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

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

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.

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

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

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

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.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

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 the shooting.

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

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

I think Tesla will most likely develop its own autopilot system for the car, as I think it should be camera-based, not Lidar-based. However, it is also possible that we do something jointly with Google.

There are some important differences between me and Tony Stark, like I have five kids, so I spend more time going to Disneyland than parties.

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

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

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

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

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

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.

We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.

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

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

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.

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.

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

I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.

One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.

The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

Four legs good, two legs bad.

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.