“Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism.”

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.

You must be an intellectual. A normal person would never believe a thing like that.

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

Sanity is not statistical.

Sanity is not statistical.

Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.