George Orwell

In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.

The one certain thing was that death never came at an expected moment.

When I joined the militia I had promised myself to kill one Fascist - after all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct.

Cricket is a game full or forlorn hopes and sudden dramatic changes of fortune and its rules are so ill-defined that their interpretation is partly an ethical business.

Whoever controls the image and information of the past determines what and how future generations will think; whoever controls the information and images of the present determines how those same people will view the past." "He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past.

All people who have reached the point of becoming nations tend to despise foreigners, but there is not much doubt that the English-speaking races are the worst offenders. One can see this from the fact that as soon as they become fully aware of any foreign race they invent an insulting nickname for it.

Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.

All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.

Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.

News is something somebody doesn't want printed; all else is advertising.

A thing which I regret, and which I will try to remedy some time, is that I have never in my life planted a walnut. Nobody does plant them nowadays-when you see a walnut it is almost invariably an old tree. If you plant a walnut you are planting it for your grandchildren, and who cares a damn for his grandchildren?

England will still be England, an everlasting animal, stretching into the future and the past and like all living things having the power to change out of all recognition and yet remain the same.

Bombing is not especially inhumane. War itself is inhumane and the bombing plane, which is used to paralyse industry and transport, is a relatively civilised weapon. 'Normal' or 'legitimate' warfare is just as destructive of inanimate objects and enormously so of human lives.

I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put if off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.

By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.

Sheer egoism... Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen - in short, with the whole top crust of humanity.

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

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

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

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

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