If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

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.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

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?

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.

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.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.