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.

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

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

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.

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

Big Brother is watching you.

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

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.

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

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

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

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.

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

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

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

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

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

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

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

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.

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

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

If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?

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.

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

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

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

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

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

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.

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.

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

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.