The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
Political language. . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right.
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.
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.
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.
I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
A family with the wrong members in control that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.
He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
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.
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.