The party is not concerned with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, providing that the hierarchical structure always remains the same.
Weakness is strength.
A peace that is truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war.
Records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth.
The Penguin books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.
And I believe that totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph again.
I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you’re more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put if off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.
Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.
Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
Public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.
It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children.
The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction.
England will still be England, an everlasting animal, stretching into the future and the past and like all living things having the power to change out of all recognition and yet remain the same.
One defeats a fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one’s intelligence.
This life we live nowadays. It’s not life, it’s stagnation death-in-life. Look at all these bloody houses and the meaningless people inside them. Sometimes I think we’re all corpses. Just rotting upright.
Is not anyone with any degree of mental honesty conscious of telling lies all day long, both in talking and writing, simply because lies will fall into artistic shape when truth will not?
The only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.
We were once told that the aeroplane had “abolished frontiers”; actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable.
There are some situations from which one can only escape by acting like a devil or a lunatic.
Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other.