I.B. George Quotes

Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future.

And the bigger the fall, the bigger the joke. It would be better fun to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at a curate.

The war is waged against its own subjects and its object is not the victory...but to keep the very structure of society intact.

The belly comes before the soul.

The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.

But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.

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

The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble.

The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth.

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

they say that time heals all things, they say you can always forget; but the smiles and the tears across the years they twist my heart strings yet!

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but the tests that have to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all cases.

Some things ARE true, even though the party says they are true.

To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armour, the apostles of martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous.

The very word 'war', therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. ... War is Peace.

There is a minority of gifted, willfuf people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

Snobbishness, like hypocrisy, is a check upon behaviour whose value from a social point of view has been underrated.

Cricket is a game full or forlorn hopes and sudden dramatic changes of fortune and its rules are so ill-defined that their interpretation is partly an ethical business.

In places this book is a little over-written, because Mr Blunden is no more able to resist a quotation than some people are to refuse a drink.

How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?

My best fishing-memory is about some fish that I never caught.

To do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife.

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.

Take pleasure in the impact of one sound on another.

But the thing that I saw in your face no power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit.

I have tipped waiters, and I have been tipped by waiters.

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.

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

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith—as mysterious as faith itself.

As a rule they will refuse even to sample a foreign dish, they regard such things as garlic and olive oil with disgust, life is unliveable to them unless they have tea and puddings.

To accept an unorthodoxy is always to inherit unresolved contradictions

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

If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man.

Everyone in our society has had to make a contribution towards dealing with the debts.

Autism is a very serious condition.

If you're looking for ways to cut waste in government, you can start with John Prescott.

Britain has no divine right to be one of the richest countries in the world.

Rare is the human being, immature or mature, who has never felt an impulse to pretend he is some one or something else.

Agreement reached by the negotiators?usually starts to collapse in the hands of those who implement it, no matter how carefully cleared at the top.

You don't get gushers of revenue by raising tax rates. You get it through expansion.

I think the idea that you would do everything you can to prevent what is coming at you by way of something very disruptive - a 9/11 - it's a no-brainer.

The higher the classification of secrecy, the quicker you will report it.

It was an attempt to stick the Congress's finger in King Hussein's eye.

The Greek people do not want to exit the euro, and I believe the Greek people already have shown that they have made major sacrifices to stay within the Eurozone.

Greece's history in the drachma was an up-and-down history, a roller coaster.

Music is in all growing things; And underneath the silky wings Of smallest insects there is stirred A pulse of air that must be heard; Earth's silence lives, and throbs, and sings.