Human beings were behaving as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.
It was given out that the animals there practised cannibalism, tortured one another with red-hot horseshoes, and had their females in common. This was what came of rebelling against the laws of Nature, Frederick and Pilkington said.
The heresy of heresies was common sense.
The whole question of evolution seems less momentous than it did, because, unlike the Victorians, we do not feel that to be descended from animals is degrading to human dignity.
Anyone who knows of a provable instance of colour discrimination ought always to expose it.
The real power, the power we have to fight for night and day, is not power over things, but over men.
One always abandons something in retreat. Look at Napoleon at the Beresina! He abandoned his whole army.
Antisemitism, for instance, is simply not the doctrine of a grown-up person.
It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith-as mysterious as faith itself. Like faith, it is ultimately not rooted in logic; it is a change in the climate of the mind.
I understand HOW. I do not understand WHY.
One’s got to change the system, or one changes nothing.
Beauty is meaningless until it is shared.
The human beings did not hate Animal Farm any less now that it was prospering; indeed, they hated it more than ever.
The animals were happy as they had never conceived it possible to be. Every mouthful of food was an acute positive pleasure, now that it was truly their own food, produced by themselves and for themselves, not doled out to them by a grudging master.
The secret of a successful restaurant is sharp knives.
To accept an unorthodoxy is always to inherit unresolved contradictions.
The English are not happy unless they are miserable, the Irish are not at peace unless they are at war, and the Scots are not at home unless they are abroad.
Take pleasure in the impact of one sound on another.
The four great motives for writing prose are sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.
At any given moment, there is a sort of all pervading orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss large and uncomfortable facts.