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.
The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’
Napoleon is always right.
Cricket is a game full or forlorn hopes and sudden dramatic changes of fortune and its rules are so ill-defined that their interpretation is partly an ethical business.
The real test of character is how you treat someone who has no possibility of doing you any good.
What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked upon as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty becasue they have no intellect.
You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.
The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually, the three philosophies are barely distinguishable...
The organizing principal for any culture is War.
Every life viewed from the inside is a series of defeats.
At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.