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

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

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.

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

Big Brother is watching you.

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

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.

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

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

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.

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

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

Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

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

Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.

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.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.

What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?

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

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.