When I joined the militia I had promised myself to kill one Fascist - after all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct.
Serious sport is war minus the shooting.
To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
Lack of money means discomfort, means squalid worries, means shortage of tobacco, means ever-present consciousness of failure-above all, it means loneliness.
Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
In the end I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and that people can be trusted to behave decently if only you will let them alone.
[T]he more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.
Certainly all "progressive" thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain... Hitler, because in his joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don't only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades. However they may be as economic theories, Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life.
So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.
It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.
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.
Man's greatest drive is not love or hate but to change another person's writing.
It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.
So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern...Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.
The Puritanical nonsense of excluding children and therefore to some extent women from pubs has turned these places into mere boozing shops instead of the family gathering places that they ought to be.
Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip.
The stars are a free show; it don’t cost anything to use your eyes
. . . it is a corrupting thing to live one's real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it.
If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any practical result whatsoever, you've beaten them.
A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn't do the hangman's job.
I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.
Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
All nationalistic distinctions - all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect - are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people believe in them.
Follow AzQuotes on Facebook, Twitter and Google+. Every day we present the best quotes! Improve yourself, find your inspiration, share with friends
or simply: