3 December 2020 George Orwell He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.
3 December 2020 George Orwell On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
3 December 2020 George Orwell We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
3 December 2020 George Orwell Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
3 December 2020 George Orwell For a creative writer possession of the ‘truth’ is less important than emotional sincerity.
3 December 2020 George Orwell 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.
3 December 2020 George Orwell 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?
3 December 2020 George Orwell Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
3 December 2020 George Orwell 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.
3 December 2020 George Orwell 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.
3 December 2020 George Orwell To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.
3 December 2020 George Orwell Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
3 December 2020 George Orwell The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
3 December 2020 George Orwell People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
3 December 2020 George Orwell No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.
3 December 2020 George Orwell The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.
3 December 2020 George Orwell War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
3 December 2020 George Orwell A family with the wrong members in control that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
3 December 2020 George Orwell No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
3 December 2020 George Orwell There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.
3 December 2020 George Orwell Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
