It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.
The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.
I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.
The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.
I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.
At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.
Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
