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

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play.

Rich people are poor people with money.

Politics is the choice between the lesser of two evils.

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

Let’s face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism.

The object of power is power.

Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn’t matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.

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.

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.

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

Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments