People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
Good writing is like a windowpane.
Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.
Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.
Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.
Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.
In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
Liberal: a power worshipper without power.
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.
Oceania was at war with Eurasia therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
Serious sport is war minus the shooting.
The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
Four legs good, two legs bad.
For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
A family with the wrong members in control that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.
There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.
War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.
War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.
He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.