For a creative writer possession of the ‘truth’ is less important than emotional sincerity.
Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.
The Puritanical nonsense of excluding children and therefore to some extent women from pubs has turned these places into mere boozing shops instead of the family gathering places that they ought to be.
You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.
All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.
There are some things only intellectuals are crazy enough to believe.
The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.
All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.
What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
Never use a long word where a short one will do.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.
The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.
Tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country.
In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
All art is propaganda.
He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.