War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.

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

It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last—genuinely down and out.

Let’s face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.

He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment, the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.

Of pain, you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain.

By preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except the steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.

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.

There is something wrong with a regime that requires a pyramid of corpses every few years.

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.

Sanity is not statistical.

If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.

Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.

Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn’t matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you, that would be the real betrayal.

The only good human being is a dead one.

Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad.

Big Brother is watching you.

An autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

Never use a long word where a short one will do.

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.

The distinguishing mark of man is the hand, the instrument with which he does all his mischief.

The stars are a free show; it don�t cost anything to use your eyes.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.

The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it.

If you hate violence and don’t believe in politics, the only major remedy remaining is education.

One defeats a fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one’s intelligence.

One must choose between God and Man, and all “radicals” and “progressives”, from the mildest liberal to the most extreme anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

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.

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

Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn’t do the hangman’s job.

If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?

FOUR LEGS GOOD, TWO LEGS BAD.

I will work harder!

All men are enemies. All animals are comrades.

If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, “I’m a free man in here” – he tapped his forehead – “and you’re all right.”

Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.

To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.

The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.

A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims… but accomplices.

On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

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

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

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

The nation is bound together by an invisible chain.

It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.

Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.

I am struck again by the fact that as soon as a working man gets an official post in the Trade Union or goes into Labour politics, he becomes middle-class whether he will or no. ie. by fighting against the bourgeoisie he becomes a bourgeois. The fact is that you cannot help living in the manner appropriate and developing the ideology appropriate to your income.

It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith-as mysterious as faith itself. Like faith, it is ultimately not rooted in logic; it is a change in the climate of the mind.

Man is not a Yahoo, but he is rather like a Yahoo and needs to be reminded of it from time to time.

The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it.

Power-worship blurs political judgment ­because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

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.

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

In the face of pain there are no heroes.

He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.

It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same–everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same–people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

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

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

Looking at the whole world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery.

In every one of those little stucco boxes, there”s some poor bastard who”s never free except when he”s fast asleep and dreaming.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

It’s the one thing they can’t do. They can make you say anything—anything—but they can’t make you believe it. They can’t get inside you.

This is the inevitable fate of the sentimentalist. All his opinions change into their opposites at the first brush of reality.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day be day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right.

All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.

The people will believe what the media tells them they believe.

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.

The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.

There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

Political language – and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists – is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought.

No book is genuinely free from political bias.

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

He is a slave with a semblance of liberty which is worse than the most cruel slavery.

Freedom of speech is real.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.

In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

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. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

The consequences of every act are included in the act itself.

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.