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

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

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

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

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

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

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

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

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

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

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

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.

One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.

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

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