George Orwell
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.Collection: Jealousy
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.Collection: War
War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.Collection: War
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.Collection: Fear
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.Collection: Future
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?Collection: Politics
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.Collection: Food
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.Collection: Happiness
Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.Collection: Funny
There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.Collection: Intelligence
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.Collection: Good
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.Collection: Future
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.Collection: Power
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.Collection: Equality
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.Collection: Freedom
Happiness can exist only in acceptance.Collection: Happiness
The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.Collection: History
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.Collection: Religion
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.Collection: Peace
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.Collection: War
Serious sport is war minus the shooting.Collection: War
Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.Collection: Patriotism
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.Collection: Strength
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.Collection: Equality
To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.Collection: War
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.Collection: Men
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.Collection: Power
War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.Collection: War
Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.Collection: Men
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.Collection: Age
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.Collection: Freedom
Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.Collection: Society
Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.Collection: War
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.Collection: Men
Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.Collection: Power
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.Collection: War
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.Collection: Great
The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.Collection: Best
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.Collection: Future
War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.Collection: War
A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.Collection: Family
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.Collection: Imagination
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.Collection: Men
I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.Collection: Education
Those who 'abjure' violence can do so only because others are committing violence on their behalf.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.