George Orwell

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

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

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

Serious sport is war minus the shooting.

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

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.

I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

We are the dead . Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone.

The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.

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 if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.

No doubt alcohol tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must avoid but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.

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

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.

Who controls the past controls the future who controls the present controls the past.

International sport is war without shooting.