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

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.

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

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

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

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

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

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.