George Orwell

“No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.”

“Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.”

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.”

“Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

“Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.”

“Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.”

“It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.”

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”

“Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.”

“We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.”

“I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.”

“On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

“The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.”

“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.”

“Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”

“Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.”

“A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.”

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

“There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.”