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

Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.

He [Gandhi] was not one of those saints who are marked out by their phenomenal piety from childhood onwards, nor one of the other kind who forsake the world after sensational debaucheries.

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

Pessimism is reactionary because it makes the very idea of improving the world impossible.

You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity.

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.