If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
George Orwell
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
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.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
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.
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 great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
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.
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
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.
Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.
Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
Good writing is like a windowpane.
I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
