The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

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

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

I’m fat, but I’m thin inside… there’s a thin man inside every fat man.

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.