Orwell

Gems from George Orwell:

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

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

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

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.

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.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

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

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

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

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

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

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.