Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.
At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.
Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.
Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for.
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does.
English becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.
If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one. This does not always happen, but it is to be expected, and you ought not to complain if it does happen.
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.
It is difficult for a statesman who still has a political future to reveal everything that he knows.
It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.
It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.
Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.
Let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around.
Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception.
One cannot really be Catholic and grown-up.
Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.
Political language- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, boastfulness, disregard of all rules, and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.
Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils.
The English are not happy unless they are miserable, the Irish are not at peace unless they are at war, and the Scots are not at home unless they are abroad.
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
The high sentiments always win in the end- the leaders who offer blood, toil, tears, and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
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.
The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
The quickest way to end a war is to lose it.
The whole point of Christmas is that it is a debauch- as it was probably long before the birth of Christ was arbitrarily fixed at that date. Children know this very well. From their point of view Christmas is not a day of temperate enjoyment, but of fierce pleasures which they are quite willing to pay for with a certain amount of pain.
There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.
There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when 'our' side commits it.
There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter.
Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.
We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.
We have sunk so low it has become the duty of every decent, thinking individual to re-state the obvious.
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine gun.
Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
Found 53 occurence(s) in 52,783 quotation(s).
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