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