Quotes to inspire and reflect

Where’s the man could ease a heart like a satin gown?

By the time you say you’re his,

Guns aren’t lawful;

If, with the literate, I am

Men seldom make passes

Why is it no one ever sent me yet

Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,

Four be the things I’d been better without:

Let us sleep now.

I am the enemy you killed, my friend.

Whatever hope is yours,

It seemed that out of battle I escaped

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Was it for this the clay grew tall?

The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

All a poet can do today is warn.

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

My subject is War, and the pity of War.

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

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

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.

Serious sport … is war minus the shooting.

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.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.

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

The Lottery, with its weekly pay-out of enormous prizes, was the one public event to which the proles paid serious attention

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

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

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

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

Old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings … these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene.

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

I’m fat, but I’m thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there’s a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there’s a statue inside every block of stone?

He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him).

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Good prose is like a window-pane.

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

Four legs good, two legs bad.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.

I am I plus my surroundings, and if I do not preserve the latter I do not preserve myself.

Filling a space in a beautiful way. That’s what art means to me.

A pint of plain is your only man.