"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."

"There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction."

"Liberal: a power worshipper without power."

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

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

"Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing."

"We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose."

"He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him."

"To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself."

"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."

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

"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."

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

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

"Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing."

"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."

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

"The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time."

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

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

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

"A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion."

"Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper."

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

"A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him."

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

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

"Big Brother is watching you."

"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."

"Happiness can exist only in acceptance."

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

"Myths which are believed in tend to become true."

"Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible."

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

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

"Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell."

"To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization."

"The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth."

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

"I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man."

"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it."

"Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception."

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

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

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

"One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship."

"Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there."

"Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent."

"As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me."

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