Right thinking will be rewarded, wrong thinking punished.
If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver’s Travels among them.
I had been in London innumerable times, and yet till that day I had never noticed one of the worst things about London-the fact that it costs money even to sit down.
If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one. This does not always happen, but it is to be expected, and you ought not to complain if it does happen.
In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.
Man’s greatest drive is not love or hate but to change another person’s writing.
The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background.
The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside.
The hospital is the antechamber to the tomb.
From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned.
There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than through the corruption of language.
Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though all one’s blood had been pumped out and lukewarm water substituted.
However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing.
The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
Revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job.
It was soon noticed that when ever there was work to be done the cat could never be found.
The plant is blind but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will continue to do this in the face of endless discouragements.
It’s not so much staying alive, it’s staying human that’s important. What counts is that we don’t betray each other.
Fate seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes.
We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.