GEORGE ORWELL

• Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.


• A person of bourgeois origin goes through life with some expectation of getting what he wants, within reasonable limits. Hence the fact that in times of stress 'educated' people tend to come to the front.


• Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.


• All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.


• I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.


• Almost certainly we are moving into an age of totalitarian dictatorships. An age in which freedom of thought will be at first a deadly sin and later on a meaningless abstraction. The autonomous individual is going to be stamped out of existence.


• At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.


• Power worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.


• Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.


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


• The real working class, though they hate war and are immune to jingoism, are never really pacifist, because their life teaches them something different.


• Liberal - a power worshipper without the power.


• It is brought home to you...that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior.


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


• A humanitarian is always a hypocrite.


• If human equality is to be forever averted-if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently-then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.


• Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.


• In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.


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


• To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armour, the apostles of the martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when the time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and the famous.


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


• If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on the human face-forever...And remember that it is forever.


• 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.


• The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.


• Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.


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


• The high sentiments always win in the end, the leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.


• The only people who are never converted to spiritualism are conjurers.


• If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.


• Conscious futility is something only for the young. One cannot go on 'despairing of life' into a ripe old age.