Happy Birthday George Orwell!

Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

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

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

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.

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

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.

In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

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

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

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

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

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

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

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.

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.

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

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

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

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

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

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.

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.

Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.