“I have no wish to take life, not even human life”

“No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”

“Clover was a stout motherly mare approaching middle life, who had never quite got her figure back after her fourth foal.”

“[You write out of the] desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, etc., etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive and a strong one.”

“There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter.”

“Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war!”

“Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? - Lady Macbeth”

“I had rather chop this hand off at a blow,And with the other fling it at thy face.”

“Wolves and bears, they say, casting their savagery aside, have done like offices of pity.”

“We that are true lovers run into strange capers; but as all is mortal in nature, so is all nature in love mortal in folly.”

“It is a familiar beast to man, and signifies love.”

“I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. We have definitely adopted the position at the Peace Conference of arguing in favour of the retention of gas as a permanent method of warfare. It is sheer affectation to lacerate a man with the poisonous fragment of a bursting shell and to boggle at making his eyes water by means of lachrymatory gas.”

“I am both pleased but astonished by the fact that mankind has not yet begun to use all the means and devices that are available for destruction. I hope that such weapons are never manufactured in quantity.”

“The United States, and other advanced nations, will someday be able to produce instruments of death so terrible the world will be in abject terror of itself and its ability to end civilization.... Such war-making weapons should be developed - but only for purposes of discovery and experimentation”