Imperialism as he [Kipling] sees it is a sort of forcible evangelising.

The people will believe what the media tells them they believe.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than through the corruption of language

It was not the man's brain that was speaking; it was his larynx.