George Orwell

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

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

Serious sport is war minus the shooting.

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

For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.

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

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

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

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

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.

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

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

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.

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

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

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

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.

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

The only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.