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

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.

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.

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

There’s lots of good fish in the sea, maybe, but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you’re not mackerel or herring yourself, you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.

The goal of good health is to enable a person to acquire wisdom.

Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work.

Be independent of the good opinion of other people.

I think a power to do something is of value. Whether the result is a good thing or a bad thing depends on how it is used, but the power is a value.

Show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men, without a consequent loss of liberty?

Most of the evil in this world is done by people with good intentions.

I think of Westernized culture as a good visual for my music.