George Orwell

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.

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

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

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.

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

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

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

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

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