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

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

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

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

"Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious."

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

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

"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."

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

"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."

"Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility."

"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."

"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act."

"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?"

"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?"

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

"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act."

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

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

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

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

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

"Good writing is like a windowpane."

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

"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."

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

"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."

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

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

"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 is war. The only good human being is a dead one."

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

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

"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."

"Serious sport is war minus the shooting."