George Orwell

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

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

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

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

Football is war minus the shooting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

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.

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.