 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded. |
| War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. |
| 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. |
| War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil. |
| 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 intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time. |
| The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. |
| Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers. |
| Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them. |
| One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up. |
| If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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? |
| One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship. |
| Big Brother is watching you. |
