Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache... Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.

The heresy of heresies was common sense.

Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.

The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.

Sometimes they threaten you with something - something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to So-and-so. And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself, and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You WANT it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care is yourself.

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.

Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.