As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
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.
War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.
The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.
The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.
Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.
Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.
A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
