So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.

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

He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed.

[You write out of the] desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, etc., etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive and a strong one.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

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.