“Despotic governments can stand ‘moral force’ till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.”

A man receiving charity always hates his benefactor- it is a fixed characteristic of human nature.

Right thinking will be rewarded, wrong thinking punished.

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

When I see a policeman with a club beating a man on the ground, I don’t have to ask whose side I’m on.

He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

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

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Might the peasant expect the Almighty to stay the thunder storm, which clears the air of a nation from pestilence, lest the lightning bold should in its flash kill his cow?

But don’t blame me for the food. My wife knows a hundred and one ways to incinerate a cow, and as far as I can tell she’s still experimenting.

Blue Jeans? They should be worn by farm girls milking cows!

Single-mindedness is all very well in cows or baboons; in an animal claiming to belong to the same species as Shakespeare, it is simply disgraceful.

Not so the oven-bird, or the other birds that walk, as the cow-bunting, or the quail, or the crow. They move the head forward with the movement of the feet.

The money in politics is a cash cow for the media.

Making fun of born-again Christians is like hunting dairy cows with a high powered rifle and scope.

As I stood outside in Cow Lane, it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No … eight days a week.