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.
Human beings were behaving as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.
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.
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.