George Orwell

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.

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation.

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.

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?

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

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

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

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

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.

What he realised, and more clearly as time went on, was that money-worship has been elevated into a religion. Perhaps it is the only real religion-the only felt religion-that is left to us. Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success. Hence the profoundly significant phrase, to make good. The decalogue has been reduced to two commandments. One for the employers-the elect, the money priesthood as it were- 'Thou shalt make money'; the other for the employed- the slaves and underlings'- 'Thou shalt not lose thy job.' It was about this time that he came across The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and read about the starving carpenter who pawns everything but sticks to his aspidistra. The aspidistra became a sort of symbol for Gordon after that. The aspidistra, the flower of England! It ought to be on our coat of arms instead of the lion and the unicorn. There will be no revolution in England while there are aspidistras in the windows.

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

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.