George Orwell

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

“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.”

“Happiness can exist only in acceptance.”

“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”

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

“Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.”

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

“Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.”

“No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.”

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

“Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.”

“The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.”

“No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.”

“There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.”

“In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.”

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”

“I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.”

“A family with the wrong members in control that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.”

“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.”

“We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.”

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

“Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.”

“All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.”