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

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.

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

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

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

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

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

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

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

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

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.

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.

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

Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

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

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.

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

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.

To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.

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.

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

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?

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

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

Big Brother is watching you.

Serious sport is war minus the shooting.

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.

Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

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.

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.

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

We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.

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

I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.

One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.

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

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

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

A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

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.

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

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

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

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

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

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.