313 quotes
One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
Homage to Catalonia (1938)
When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer.
Charles Dickens (1939)
If there are certain pages of Mr Bertrand Russell's book, Power, which seem rather empty, that is merely to say that we have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
If a man cannot enjoy the return of spring, why should he be happy in a labour-saving Utopia? What will he do with the leisure that the machine will give him?
I'm fat, but I'm thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there is a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there's a statue inside every block of stone?
Coming Up for Air (1939)
In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.
To admit that an opponent might be both honest and intelligent is felt to be intolerable. It is more immediately satisfying to shout that he is a fool or a scoundrel, or both, than to find out what he is really like.
As I Please (1943)
He had reached the age when the future ceases to be a rosy blur and becomes actual and menacing.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
He had two subjects of conversation, the shame and come-down of being a tramp, and the best way of getting a free meal.
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
It is just thinkable that books may some day be written by machinery....
Every war, when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defence against a homicidal maniac.
Their friendship was at an end, it seemed to him. The evil time when he had lived on Ravelston had spoiled everything. Charity kills friendship.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.
The Lion and the Unicorn (1941)
Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.
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.
As I Please (1943)
Envy is a horrible thing. It is unlike all other kinds of suffering in that there is no disguising it, no elevating it into tragedy. It is more than merely painful, it is disgusting.
Burmese Days (1934)
Actually, the problem for the world as a whole is not how to distribute such wealth that exists but how to increase production, without which economic equality merely means common misery.
The great disadvantage, and advantage, of the small urban bourgeois is his limited outlook. He sees the world as a middle-class world, and everything outside, these limits is either laughable or slightly wicked.
Charles Dickens (1939)