Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

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

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

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

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

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

We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

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.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

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.

War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.

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.

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.

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

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

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.

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

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 right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?

We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

Serious sport is war minus the shooting.