 The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent. |
| Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. |
| Myths which are believed in tend to become true. |
| Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility. |
| We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm. |
| Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. |
| Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness. |
| Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism. |
| Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception. |
| Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end. |
| Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent. |
| People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf. |
| 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. |
| Liberal: a power worshipper without power. |
| I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man. |
| But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. |
| During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act. |
| 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. |
| As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. |
| 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. |
