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