George Orwell

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

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.

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.

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

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

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

Big Brother is watching you.

It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

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.

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.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

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