GEORGE ORWELL

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

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

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

Four legs good, two legs bad.

Serious sport is war minus the shooting.

We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

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.

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

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

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

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?

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

All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

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.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

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

One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.

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.