 Good writing is like a windowpane. |
| War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength. |
| The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth. |
| 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. |
| We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun. |
| Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious. |
| If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. |
| There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them. |
| He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Happiness can exist only in acceptance. |
| Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards. |
| War is war. The only good human being is a dead one. |
| Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. |
| In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. |
| Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice. |
| We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. |
| On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time. |
| The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it. |
