“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

Fate seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes.

Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.

The best books are those that tell you what you know already.

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

The people will believe what the media tells them they believe.

If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.

In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.

Beauty is meaningless until it is shared.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

I can do this, I lied to myself feebly. No one was going to bite me.

True love sets you free, not imprisons you.

Hero-worship is strongest where there is least regard for human freedom.

Cuba ought to be free and independent, and the government should be turned over to the Cuban people.

We are no longer a government by free opinion, no longer a government by conviction and the vote of the majority, but a government by the opinion and the duress of small groups of dominant men.

Being angry and resentful of someone is like letting them live rent-free in your head.

Freedom comes from human beings, rather than from laws and institutions.

No government has ever been beneficent when the attitude of government was that it was taking care of the people. The only freedom consists in the people taking care of the government.