Never have ideas about children, and never have ideas for them.
The Communism of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.
Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99 percent of the population exist.
And it is a great thing to die in your own bed, though it is better still to die in your boots.
Why was it that they could never shout like that about something that mattered?
The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think worth describing in detail.
He had moved from thought to words, and now from words to actions.
In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except “Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it”? Money has become the grand test of virtue.
The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia’s life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.
There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word – Man.
Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.
Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.
War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.
When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
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.