1. “ Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.”
2. “ The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.”
3. “ In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
4. “ Big Brother is watching you.”
5. “ He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
6. “ If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
7. “ Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. ”
8. “ The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
9. “ Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
10. “ We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.”
11. “ All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
12. “ War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
13. “ Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
14. “ Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”
15. “ Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
16. “ If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”
17. “ Sanity is not statistical.”
18. “ If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
19. “ Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”
20. “ Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
21. “ People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
22. “ Happiness can exist only in acceptance.”
23. “ Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.”
24. “ If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
25. “ Free speech is my right to say what you don’t want to hear.”
26. “ The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”
27. “ We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”
28. “ To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”
29. “ The people will believe what the media tells them they believe.”
30. “ All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.”
31. “ The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”
32. “ When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”
33. “ He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”
34. “ Rich people are poor people with money.”
35. “ A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.”
36. “ It’s not so much staying alive, it’s staying human that’s important. What counts is that we don’t betray each other.”
37. “ The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.”
38. “ If there is hope, it lies in the proles.”
39. “ We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
40. “ Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.”
41. “ I understand HOW. I do not understand WHY.”
42. “ Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
43. “ If you want to know who rules over you, look at who you are not allowed to criticize.”
44. “ In the face of pain there are no heroes.”
45. “ The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background.”
46. “ But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
47. “ You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”
48. “ It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
49. “ He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.”
50. “ The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.”
