The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.
Sanity is not statistical.
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.
It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs – and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.