To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.
Every Joke is a Tiny Revolution.
A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.
It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.
Before the war, and especially before the Boer War, it was summer all the year round.
Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it.
Money writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, O Lord, give me money, only money.
The cheaper books become, the less money is spent on books.
The one certain thing was that death never came at an expected moment.
A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack on morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise.
England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.
One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death.
Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, but then fail all the more completely because he drinks.
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.
When I joined the militia I had promised myself to kill one Fascist – after all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct.
History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by neurotics.
By revolution we become more ourselves, not less.