Can you not understand that liberty is worth more than just ribbons?
He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.
The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.
Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey.
If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.
They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself.
The food crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in the hopes of adding five years onto the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.
He would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies.
An earthquake is such fun when it is over.
Last of all came the cat, who looked round, as usual, for the warmest place, and finally squeezed herself in between Boxer and Clover; there she purred contentedly throughout Major’s speech without listening to a word of what he was saying.
In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.
It is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life.
Why should be fruit be held inferior to the flower?
The belly comes before the soul.
I have no wish to take life, not even human life.
For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.
If you have no money, men won’t care for you, women won’t love you; won’t, that is, care for you or love you the last little bit that matters.
A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into.
No one is patriotic about taxes.
Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.