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

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.

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

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

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

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.

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

The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

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

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

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

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

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

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

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

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

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

Big Brother is watching you.

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