For a creative writer possession of the “truth” is less important than emotional sincerity.
Big Brother is watching you.
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
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.
A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
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.
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?
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
Four legs good, two legs bad.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
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.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
Liberal: a power worshipper without power.
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
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.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
