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

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

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

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

Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

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

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

For a creative writer possession of the ‘truth’ is less important than emotional sincerity.

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

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

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

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

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

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

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

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

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

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.