Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
No one can look back on his school days and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.
Good writing is like a windowpane.
To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.
Big brother is watching you.
Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in god as personally dislike him.
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing england in a phrase.
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.
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. lies will pass into history.