George Orwell

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

“To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.”

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

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

“Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

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

“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.”

“Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.”

“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”

“Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.”

“Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.”

“To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.”

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

“We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.”

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

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

“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”

“At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.”

“The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.”

“Big Brother is watching you.”

“A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.”

“Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.”

“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”

“Myths which are believed in tend to become true.”

“The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.”

“Good writing is like a windowpane.”

“Happiness can exist only in acceptance.”

“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.”

“Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.”

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

“Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”

“We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.”

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

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

“War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.”

“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”

“Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.”

“I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.”

“War is peace.”

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

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

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”

“Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.”

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”

“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.”

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

“Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.”

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

“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.”

“The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.”

“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.”

“One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think, as I thought then, that it is better to die violently and not too old.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.”

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

“Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

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

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

“To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!”

“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.”

“Man is not a Yahoo, but he is rather like a Yahoo and needs to be reminded of it from time to time.”

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

“Think of life as it really is, think of the details of life; and then think that there is no meaning in it, no purpose, no goal except the grave. Surely only fools or self-deceivers, or those whose lives are exceptionally fortunate, can face that thought without flinching?”

“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 a mysterious thing, the loss of faith-as mysterious as faith itself. Like faith, it is ultimately not rooted in logic; it is a change in the climate of the mind.”

“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.”

“There is a geographical element in all belief-saying what seem profound truths in India have a way of seeming enormous platitudes in England, and vice versa. Perhaps the fundamental difference is that beneath a tropical sun individuality seems less distinct and the loss of it less important.”

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

“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.”

“I am struck again by the fact that as soon as a working man gets an official post in the Trade Union or goes into Labour politics, he becomes middle-class whether he will or no. ie. by fighting against the bourgeoisie he becomes a bourgeois. The fact is that you cannot help living in the manner appropriate and developing the ideology appropriate to your income.”

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

“In addition to this there is the horrible — the really disquieting — prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.”

“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.”

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

“Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.”

“Every war, when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defence against a homicidal maniac.”

“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 essential job is to get people to recognise war propaganda when they see it, especially when it is disguised as peace propaganda.”

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

“One is almost driven to the cynical conclusion that men are only decent when they are powerless.”

“Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.”

“Has it ever struck you that there's a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there's a statue inside every block of stone?”

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

“The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually in the past.”

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

“Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.”

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

“It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.”

“One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.”

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

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

“[T]here is something wrong with a regime that requires a pyramid of corpses every few years.”

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

“We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.”

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

“Even as it stands, the Home Guard could only exist in a country where men feel themselves free. The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. THAT RIFLE HANGING ON THE WALL OF THE WORKING-CLASS FLAT OR LABOURER'S COTTAGE, IS THE SYMBOL OF DEMOCRACY. IT IS OUR JOB TO SEE THAT IT STAYS THERE.”

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

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

“Four legs good, two legs bad.”

“Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi.”

“We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.”

“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.”

“The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world: that is evil; or you can overthrow them by war, which is also evil. There is no other choice before you, and whichever you choose you will not come out with clean hands.”

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

“You and I both know that there can be no real solution of the Indian problem which does not also benefit Britain. Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does. It is so obvious, is it not, that the British worker as well as the Indian peasant stands to gain by the ending of capitalist exploitation, and that Indian independence is a lost cause if the Fascist nations are allowed to dominate the world.”

“Liberal: a power worshipper without power.”

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

“Both men were the spiritual children of Voltaire, both had an ironical, sceptical view of life, and a native pessimism overlaid by gaiety; both knew that the existing social order is a swindle and its cherished beliefs mostly delusions.”

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

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

“From Carlyle onwards, but especially in the last generation, the British intelligentsia have tended to take their ideas from Europe and have been infected by habits of thought that derive ultimately from Machiavelli.  All the cults that have been fashionable in the last dozen years, Communism, Fascism, and pacifism, are in the last analysis forms of power worship.”

“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.”

“Between them these two books sum up our present predicament.  Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets, and war.  Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war.  There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect, which can only happen if the concept of right and wrong is restored to politics.”

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

“Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side.”

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

“Of course, fanatical Communists and Russophiles generally can be respected, even if they are mistaken.  But for people like ourselves, who suspect that something has gone very wrong with the Soviet Union, I consider that willingness to criticize Russia and Stalin is the test of intellectual honesty.  It is the only thing that from a literary intellectual's point of view is really dangerous.”

“A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.”

“Particularly on the Left, political thought is a sort of masturbation fantasy in which the world of facts hardly matters.”

“Serious sport is war minus the shooting.”

“Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”

“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.”

“So far as I can see, 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.”

“He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.”

“Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows, and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.”

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

“Scientific education for the masses will do little good, and probably a lot of harm, if it simply boils down to more physics, more chemistry, more biology, etc to the detriment of literature and history. Its probable effect on the average human being would be to narrow the range of his thoughts and make him more than ever contemptuous of such knowledge as he did not possess.”

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

“The whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish day-dream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.”

“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.”

“Actually there is little acute hatred of Germany left in this country, and even less, I should expect to find, in the army of occupation. Only the minority of sadists, who must have their "atrocities" from one source or another, take a keen interest in the hunting-down of war criminals and quislings.”

“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?”

“Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

“The relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion. The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.”

“What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?”

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

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

“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.”

“Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.”

“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. This is an illusion, and one should recognise it as such, but one ought also to stick to one's own world-view, even at the price of seeming old-fashioned: for that world-view springs out of experiences that the younger generation has not had, and to abandon it is to kill one's intellectual roots.”

“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.”

“Decline of the English Murder”

“The Spanish war and other events in 1936-7 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects.”

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

“If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver's Travels among them.”

“In my opinion, nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated. And so for the last ten years, I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the socialist movement.”

“The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.”

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

“If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.”

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

“The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”

“To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”

“Certainly we ought to be discontented, we ought not simply to find out ways of making the best of a bad job, and yet if we kill all pleasure in the actual process of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves? If a man cannot enjoy the return of spring, why should he be happy in a labour-saving Utopia? What will he do with the leisure that the machine will give him?”

“By preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.”

“The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.”

“He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.”

“It was only after the Soviet régime became unmistakably totalitarian that English intellectuals, in large numbers, began to show an interest in it. Burnham, although the English russophile intelligentsia would repudiate him, is really voicing their secret wish: the wish to destroy the old, equalitarian version of Socialism and usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip.”

“People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has man invented that even approaches in cruelty to some of the commoner diseases? "Natural" death, almost by definition, means something slow, smelly and painful.”

“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.”

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

“Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.”

“I always disagree, however, when people end up saying that we can only combat Communism, Fascism or what not if we develop an equal fanaticism. It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence.”

“It is difficult for a statesman who still has a political future to reveal everything that he knows: and in a profession in which one is a baby at 50 and middle-aged at seventy-five, it is natural that anyone who has not actually been disgraced should feel that he still has a future.”

“One cannot really be Catholic & grown-up.”

“At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.”

“I have always thought there might be a lot of cash in starting a new religion.”

“What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.”

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself -- that was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink.”

“The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people — people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from normal standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words.”

“I am trying to describe the people in our quarter, not for the mere curiosity, but because they are all part of the story. Poverty is what I am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this slum. The slum, with its dirt and its queer lives, was first an object-lesson in poverty, and then the background of my own experiences. It is for that reason that I try to give some idea of what life was like there.”

“Ah, the poverty, the shortness the disappointment of human joy! For in reality car en realite, what is the duration of the supreme moment of love? It is nothing, an instant, a second perhaps. A second of ecstasy, and after that- dust, ashes, nothingness.”

“In a way, the world−view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.”

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

“For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.”

“So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.”

“Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though all one's blood had been pumped out and lukewarm water substituted.”

“One always abandons something in retreat. Look at Napoleon at the Beresina! He abandoned his whole army.”

“Fate seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes.”

“Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.”

“It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.”

“I only realized during my last week that I was being cheated, and, as I could prove nothing, only twenty-five francs were refunded. The doorkeeper played similar tricks on any employee who was fool enough to be taken in. He called himself a Greek, but in reality he was an Armenian. After knowing him I saw the force of the proverb "Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek, but don't trust an Armenian."”

“Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it. … Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants, because sound food is sacrificed to punctuality and smartness... The only food at the Hotel X which was ever prepared cleanly was the staff's.”

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

“We crawled up to bed, tumbled down half dressed, and stayed there ten hours. Most of my Saturday nights went like this. On the whole, the two hours when one was perfectly and wildly happy seemed worth the subsequent headache. For many men in the quarter, unmarried and with no future to think of, the weekly drinking-bout was the one thing that made life worth living.”

“Looking round that filthy room, with raw meat lying among the refuse on the floor, and cold, clotted saucepans sprawling everywhere, and the sink blocked and coated with grease, I used to wonder whether there could be a restaurant in the world as bad as ours. But the other three all said they had been in dirtier places.”

“How sweet the air does smell — even the air of a back-street in the suburbs — after the shut-in, subfaecal stench of the spike!”

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

“He had two subjects of conversation, the shame and come-down of being a tramp, and the best way of getting a free meal.”

“The most bitter insult one can offer to a Londoner is "bastard" — which, taken for what it means, is hardly an insult at all.”

“It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.”

“Ellis was one of those people who constantly nag others to echo their own opinions.”

“Living a lie the whole time — the lie that we're here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of to rob them … it corrupts us, it corrupts us in ways you can't imagine.”

“Beauty is meaningless until it is shared.”

“Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.”

“It is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life.”

“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.”

“I always think they're rather charming-looking, the Burmese. They have such splendid bodies! Just think what sights you'd see in England if people went about half naked as they do here!”

“An earthquake is such fun when it is over.”

“Is there anything in the world more graceless, more dishonouring, than to desire a woman whom you will never have?”

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

“Envy is a horrible thing. It is unlike all other kinds of suffering in that there is no disguising it, no elevating it into tragedy. It is more than merely painful, it is disgusting.”

“Money, once again; all is money. All human relationships must be purchased with money. If you have no money, men won't care for you, women won't love you; won't, that is, care for you or love you the last little bit that matters. And how right they are, after all! For, moneyless, you are unlovable. Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels. But then, if I haven't money, I DON'T speak with the tongues of men and of angels.”

“In a country like England you can no more be cultured without money than you can join the Cavalry Club.”

“That devastating omniscience! That noxious, horn-spectacled refinement! And the money that such refinement means! For after all, what is there behind it, except money? Money for the right kind of education, money for influential friends, money for leisure and peace of mind, money for trips to Italy. Money writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, O Lord, give me money, only money.”

“Of all types of human being, only the artist takes it upon himself to say that he 'cannot' work. But it is quite true; there ARE times when one cannot work. Money again, always money! Lack of money means discomfort, means squalid worries, means shortage of tobacco, means ever-present consciousness of failure - above all, it means loneliness. How can you be anything but lonely on two quid a week? And in loneliness no decent book was ever written.”

“Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.”

“Gordon and his friends had quite an exciting time with their 'subversive ideas'. For a whole year they ran an unofficial monthly paper called the Bolshevik, duplicated with jellygraph. It advocated Socialism, free love, the dismemberment of the British Empire, the abolition of the Army and Navy, and so on and so forth. It was great fun. Every intelligent boy of sixteen is a Socialist. At that age one does not see the hook sticking out of the rather stodgy bait.”

“There are two ways to live, he decided. You can be rich, or you can deliberately refuse to be rich. You can possess money, or you can despise money; the one fatal thing is to worship money and fail to get it.”

“Most of the employees were the hard-boiled, Americanized, go-getting type to whom nothing in the world is sacred, except money. They had their cynical code worked out. The public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket. And yet beneath their cynicism there was the final naivete, the blind worship of the money-god.”

“It was queer. All over England young men were eating their hearts out for lack of jobs, and here was he, Gordon, to whom the very word 'job' was faintly nauseous, having jobs thrust unwanted upon him. It was an example of the fact that you can get anything in this world if you genuinely don't want it.”

“He had reached the age when the future ceases to be a rosy blur and becomes actual and menacing.”

“That is the devilish thing about poverty, the ever-recurrent thing - loneliness. Day after day with never an intelligent person to talk to; night after night back to your godless room, always alone. Perhaps it sounds rather fun if you are rich and sought-after; but how different it is when you do it from necessity!”

“When you have no money your life is one long series of snubs.”

“Gordon put his hand against the swing door. He even pushed it open a few inches. The warm fog of smoke and beer slipped through the crack. A familiar, reviving smell; nevertheless as he smelled it his nerve failed him. No! Impossible to go in. He turned away. He couldn't go shoving into that saloon bar with only fourpence halfpenny in his pocket. Never let other people buy your drinks for you! The first commandment of the moneyless. He made off down the dark pavement.”

“Social failure, artistic failure, sexual failure - they are all the same. And lack of money is at the bottom of them all.”

“No rich man ever succeeds in disguising himself as a poor man; for money, like murder, will out.”

“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.”

“This life we live nowadays! It's not life, it's stagnation, death-in-life. Look at all these bloody houses, and the meaningless people inside them! Sometimes I think we're all corpses. Just rotting upright.”

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

“Money is the one thing you must never mention when you are with people richer than yourself. Or if you do, then it must be money in the abstract, money with a big 'M', not the actual concrete money that's in your pocket and isn't in mine.”

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

“Poverty is spiritual halitosis.”

“Hermione always yawned at the mention of Socialism, and refused even to read Antichrist. 'Don't talk to me about the lower classes,' she used to say. 'I hate them. They smell.' And Ravelston adored her.”

“Marriage is only a trap set for you by the money-god. You grab the bait; snap goes the trap; and there you are, chained by the leg to some 'good' job till they cart you to Kensal Green. And what a life! Licit sexual intercourse in the shade of the aspidistra. Pram-pushing and sneaky adulteries. And the wife finding you out and breaking the cut-glass whisky decanter over your head.”

“Without money, you can't be straightforward in your dealings with women. For without money, you can't pick and choose, you've got to take what women you can get; and then, necessarily, you've got to break free of them. Constancy, like all other virtues, has got to be paid for in money.”

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

“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”

“Why is it that one can't borrow from a rich friend and can from a half-starved relative?”

“He would only drift and sink, drift and sink, like the others of his family; but worse than them - down, down into some dreadful sub-world that as yet he could only dimly imagine. It was what he had chosen when he declared war on money. Serve the money-god or go under; there is no other rule.”

“She looked at him helplessly. After all, it was no use. There was this money-business standing in the way - these meaningless scruples which she had never understood but which she had accepted merely because they were his. She felt all the impotence, the resentment of a woman who sees an abstract idea triumphing over common sense.”

“Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?”

“Their friendship was at an end, it seemed to him. The evil time when he had lived on Ravelston had spoiled everything. Charity kills friendship.”

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

“One's got to change the system, or one changes nothing.”

“Chiefly I remember the horsy smells, the quavering bugle-calls (all our buglers were amateurs--I first learned the Spanish bugle-calls by listening to them outside the Fascist lines), the tramp-tramp of hobnailed boots in the barrack yard, the long morning parades in the wintry sunshine, the wild games of football, fifty a side, in the gravelled riding--school.”

“I have no particular love for the idealised "worker" as he appears in the bourgeois Communist's mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”

“All Spaniards, we discovered, knew two English expressions. One was "O.K., baby", the other was a word used by the Barcelona whores in their dealings with English sailors, and I am afraid the compositors would not print it.”

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

“The fat Russian agent was cornering all the foreign refugees in turn and explaining plausibly that this whole affair was an Anarchist plot. I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies — unless one counts journalists.”

“It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle … There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.”

“An immense amount, enough to fill many books, has already been written on the subject [of the Barcelona fighting], and I do not suppose I should exaggerate if I said that nine-tenths of it is untruthful.”

“It seemed queer, in the barber's shop, to see the Anarchist notice still on the wall, explaining that tips were prohibited. "The Revolution has struck off our chains," the notice said. I felt like telling the barbers that their chains would soon be back on again if they didn't look out.”

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

“It is sometimes a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is changing the conditions of warfare. In the next great war, we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.”

“Everyone always did miss everyone else in this war, whenever it was humanly possible to do so.”

“It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.”

“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”

“No one I met at this time — doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients — failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.”

“Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.”

“The outstanding, unmistakable mark of Dickens's writing is the unnecessary detail.”

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

“There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all.”

“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life.”

“Is the English press honest or dishonest? At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news. Yet I do not suppose there is one paper in England that can be straightforwardly bribed with hard cash. In the France of the Third Republic all but a very few of the newspapers could notoriously be bought over the counter like so many pounds of cheese.”

“The British ruling class were not altogether wrong in thinking that Fascism was on their side. It is a fact that any rich man, unless he is a Jew, has less to fear from Fascism than from either Communism or democratic Socialism. One ought never to forget this, for nearly the whole of German and Italian propaganda is designed to cover it up.”

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

“[A] world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area does sometimes make me wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony bin made use of by some other planet.”

“Not to have a national anthem would be logical.”

“Antisemitism, for instance, is simply not the doctrine of a grown-up person.”

“The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits 'atrocities' but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future.”

“If you talk to a thoughtful Christian, Catholic or Anglican, you often find yourself laughed at for being so ignorant as to suppose that anyone ever took the doctrines of the Church literally.”

“[Man] is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.”

“Let a politician die, and his worst enemies will stand up on the floor of the House and utter pious lies in his honour, but a writer or artist must be sniffed at, at least if he is any good.”

“[E]ven stupidity is better than totalitarianism.”

“A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.”

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

“It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley’s broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”

“One of the big failures in human history has been the agelong attempt to stop women painting their faces.”

“Happiness can exist only in acceptance.”

“In the nineteenth century some parts of the world were unexplored, but there was almost no restriction on travel.  Up to 1914 you did not need a passport for any country except Russia.  The European emigrant, if he could scrape together a few pounds for the passage, simply set sail for America or Australia, and when he got there no questions were asked.  In the eighteenth century it had been quite normal and safe to travel in a country with which your own country was at war.”

“A phrase much used in political circles in this country is "playing into the hands of".  It is a sort of charm or incantation to silence uncomfortable truths.  When you are told that by saying this, that or the other you are "playing into the hands of" some sinister enemy, you know that it is your duty to shut up immediately.”

“Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.”

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

“[T]he outcry against killing women, if you accept killing at all, is sheer sentimentality.  Why is it worse to kill a woman than a man?”

“The whole question of evolution seems less momentous than it did, because, unlike the Victorians, we do not feel that to be descended from animals is degrading to human dignity.”

“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.”

“In any form of art designed to appeal to large numbers of people,...[t]he rich man is usually 'bad', and his machinations are invariably frustrated.  'Good poor man defeats bad rich man' is an accepted formula.”

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

“Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for.  Don't imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency.  Once a whore, always a whore.”

“Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.”

“The thing that strikes me more and more—and it strikes a lot of other people, too—is the extraordinary viciousness and dishonesty of political controversy in our time.  I don't mean merely that controversies are acrimonious.  They ought to be that when they are on serious subjects.  I mean that almost nobody seems to feel that an opponent deserves a fair hearing or that the objective truth matters as long as you can score a neat debating point.”

“It is not a good symptom that hanging should still be the accepted form of capital punishment in this country.  Hanging is a barbarous, inefficient way of killing anybody, and at least one fact about it—quite widely known, I believe—is so obscene as to be almost unprintable.”

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

“While the game of deadlocks and bottle-necks goes on, another more serious game is also being played. It is governed by two axioms. One is that there can be no peace without a general surrender of sovereignty: the other is that no country capable of defending its sovereignty ever surrenders it. If one keeps these axioms in mind one can generally see the relevant facts in international affairs through the smoke-screen with which the newspapers surround them.”

“If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, "I'm a free man in here" - he tapped his forehead - "and you're all right.”

“We have become too civilized to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those who don't take the sword perish by smelly diseases.”

“there is no real Jewish “problem” in England. The Jews are not numerous or powerful enough, and it is only in what are loosely called “intellectual circles” that they have any noticeable influence.”

“Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception.”

“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”

“Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.”

“If one harbours anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible. Here are just a few examples. I list below five types of nationalist, and against each I append a fact which it is impossible for that type of nationalist to accept, even in his secret thoughts:”

“There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when 'our' side commits it.”

“One need not swallow such absurdities as this, but one ought to recognise that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy.”

“Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble.”

“He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.”

“All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.”

“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.”

“A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”

“Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.”

“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.”

“Political language — and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists — is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

“Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”

“One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.”

“At about the time when the autobiography first appeared I remember reading its opening chapters in the ill-printed pages of some Indian newspaper. They made a good impression on me, which Gandhi himself at that time did not.”

“Of late years it has been the fashion to talk about Gandhi as though he were not only sympathetic to the Western Left-wing movement, but were integrally part of it. Anarchists and pacifists, in particular, have claimed him for their own, noticing only that he was opposed to centralism and State violence and ignoring the other-worldly, anti-humanist tendency of his doctrines.”

“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals.”

“It is difficult to see how Gandhi's methods could be applied in a country where opponents of the regime disappear in the middle of the night and are never heard of again. Without a free press and the right of assembly, it is impossible not merely to appeal to outside opinion, but to bring a mass movement into being, or even to make your intentions known to your adversary.”