I have tipped waiters, and I have been tipped by waiters.
What is not hereditary cannot be permanent.
Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.
Winston was gelatinous with fatigue.
Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on – that is, badly.
But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.
The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.
In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted; in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.
He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.
When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys.
Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.
It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.
To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one’s lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.
Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.
In moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one’s own body.
Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated.
The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.
International football is the continuation of war by other means.
All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery.
Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes.