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

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" A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him. "

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

" All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome. "

" The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun. "

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

" The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. "

" We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose. "

" Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing. "

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" A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase. "

" War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent. "

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" I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man. "

" People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. "

" Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. "

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

" It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane. "

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" The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded. "

" He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him. "

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" 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. "

" In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia. "

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

" We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. "

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" Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever. "