1. “Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.”
2. “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
3. “All people who have reached the point of becoming nations tend to despise foreigners, but there is not much doubt that the English-speaking races are the worst offenders. One can see this from the fact that as soon as they become fully aware of any foreign race they invent an insulting nickname for it.”
4. “All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
5. “Big Brother is watching you.”
6. “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
7. “"Doublethink" means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
8. “Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
9. “Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.”
10. ”For a creative writer possession of the "truth" is less important than emotional sincerity.”
11. ”He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past.”
12. “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
13. “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
14. “In an age of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
15. ”i. Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. ii. Never use a long word where a short one will do. iii. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. iv. Never use the passive where you can use the active. v. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. vi. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
16. “Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.”
17. “On the whole human beings want to be good, but not to good and not quite all the time.”
18. ”Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.”
19. “Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
20. “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. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”
21. “The best books...are those that tell you what you know already.”
22. “The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which some cases can even survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.”
23. "The choice before human beings is not between good and evil but between two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world, that is evil; or you can overthrow them by war, which is also evil. Whatever you choose you will not come out of it with clean hands"
24. “The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
25. “The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”
26. ”The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.”
27. “Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude toward one another, have varied from age to age; but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other. The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim -- for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives -- is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves, or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High. Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never even temporarily successful in achieving their aims. It would be an exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no progress of a material kind. Even today, in a period of decline, the average human being is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer. From the point of view of the law, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of the masters.”
28. "To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic..."
29. “To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle.”
30. "...Two and two are four . Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane."
31. “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
32. “War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it. Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homocidal maniac."
33. "What does it matter to be laughed at? The big public, in any case, usually doesn't see the joke, and if you state your principles clearly and stick to them, it's wonderful how people come around to you in the end."
34. ”Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
