He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.
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.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
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.
A family with the wrong members in control that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.
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.
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
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.