All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

It was given out that the animals there practised cannibalism, tortured one another with red-hot horseshoes, and had their females in common. This was what came of rebelling against the laws of Nature, Frederick and Pilkington said.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

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.

The existence of good bad literature—the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously—is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.

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.