Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

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

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

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

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.

I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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