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