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

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

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.

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.

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

Serious sport is war minus the shooting.

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

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Four legs good, two legs bad.

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

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.

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

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

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

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

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

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

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.

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

One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.

Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

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

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.

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

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

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

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

A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

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

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

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.