Quotes, Quotations and Sayings

For the ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics) he feels himself master of his fate, but against major events he is as helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavoring to influence the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him.

War is Peace Freedom is Slavery Ignorance is Strength

If Abu Nidal is a terrorist, then so is George Washington. (Reply to President Ronald Reagan in defense of Palestinian terrorist)

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.

George May the wind always be at your back and the sun upon your face. Fred And may the winds of destiny carry you aloft to dance with the stars.

I just remember George smiling and how happy he was.

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

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

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

An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

George Orwell was an optimist.

People think my friend George is weird because he wears sideburns...behind his ears. I think he's weird because he wears false teeth...with braces on them.

Do not keep the alabaster boxes of your love and tenderness sealed up until your friends are dead. Fill their lives with sweetness, speak cheering words while their ears can hear, and while their hearts can be thrilled and made happier by them. George

I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.

Slater Behind every good man there is a woman, and that woman was Martha Washington man, and everyday George would come home, she would have a big fat bowl waiting for him, man when he come in the door, man she was a hip, hip, hip lady, man.

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

George It was the greatest feeling I ever had. Followed abruptly by the worst feeling I ever had.

George The official toxicity limit for humans is between one and one and half grams of cocaine depending on body weight. I was averaging five grams a day, maybe more. I snorted ten grams in ten minutes once. I guess I had a high tolerance.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being but to remind him that he is already degraded.

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

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

Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals.

Tradition! We scarcely know the word anymore. We are afraid to be either proud of our ancestors or ashamed of them. We scorn nobility in name and in fact. We cling to a bourgeois mediocrity which would make it appear we are all Americans, made in the image and likeness of George Washington.

Four legs good, two legs bad.

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.

The main motive for ''nonattachment'' is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.

I am only an average man but, by George, I work harder at it than the average man.

The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.

One thing I can say about George... he may not be able to keep a job, but he's not boring.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

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

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

One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.

One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.

To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.

Throughout recorded time... there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other. The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable.

To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle.

The ''Communism'' of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for socialism is its adherents.

If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics --a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage --surely that proves that you are in the right?

Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.

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

We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

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