By the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it.
When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash.
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
Winston Churchill could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war.
The Party is not interested in the overt act. The thought is all we care about.
It’s frightful that people who are so ignorant have so much influence.
It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.
And the bigger the fall, the bigger the joke. It would be better fun to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at a curate.
Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles.
Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges.
Politically, Swift was one of those people who are driven into a sort of perverse Toryism by the follies of the progressive party of the moment.
The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system.
Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly, there is nothing left but quietism – robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it.
Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble.
A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things.
The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped.
A Socialist United States of Europe seems to me the only worth-while political objective today.
To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.
The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils.
Pessimism is reactionary because it makes the very idea of improving the world impossible.