The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable.’
Napoleon is always right.
Cricket is a game full or forlorn hopes and sudden dramatic changes of fortune and its rules are so ill-defined that their interpretation is partly an ethical business.
The real test of character is how you treat someone who has no possibility of doing you any good.
What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked upon as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty becasue they have no intellect.
You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.
The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually, the three philosophies are barely distinguishable...
The organizing principal for any culture is War.
Every life viewed from the inside is a series of defeats.
At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.
It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.
The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.
The fight against bad English is not frivolous.
Some things ARE true, even though the party says they are true.
There is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.
Ignorance and prejudice are the ballast of our ship of state – however, ships without ballast are not seaworthy and cannot sail in the tempests, nor reach a safe harbor.
To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.
Preventive war is a crime not easily committed by a country that retains any traces of democracy.
Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.
I’m fat, but I’m thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there’s a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there’s a statue inside every block of stone?