[A] rifle hanging on the wall of the working class flat or laborer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.
[The masses] can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect.
[When war is continuous] technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded.
A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.
A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war.
All art is propaganda … [but] not all propaganda is art.
All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.
All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers.
An earthquake is such fun when it is over.
Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness.
Beauty is meaningless until it is shared.
Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were halfhearted and inefficient.
Dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for.
Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
In order to rule over barbarians, you have got to become a barbarian yourself.
It is almost impossible to think without talking. ... Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.
It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two plus two will make five when the Leader says so.
It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.
One is almost driven to the cynical conclusion that men are only decent when they are powerless.
Power is not a means; it is an end. ... The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
Since the Party is in full control of all records and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.
So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.
Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils.
The essential job is to get people to recognize war propaganda when they see it, especially when it is disguised as peace propaganda
The horrible thing about the ‘Two Minutes Hate’ was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in.
The loss of faith is as mysterious as faith itself. … It is ultimately not rooted in logic; it is a change in the climate of the mind.
The object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.
The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.
The totalitarian states can do great things, but...they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom.
The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.
The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.
The world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it.
There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all.
Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.
Threats to freedom of speech, writing, and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect.
To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
Totalitarianism demands...a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.
Totalitarianism demands...the continuous alteration of the past.
War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
We have become too civilized to grasp the obvious.
We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
When war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous.
When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity.
Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.
Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.
You can get anything in this world if you genuinely don't want it.
You cannot produce a vigorous literature by terrorizing everyone into conformity.