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

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.

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

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.

I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.

Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

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.

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.

On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.

It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.

The cynics are right nine times out of ten.

I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

Morality is the theory that every human act must be either right or wrong, and that 99 % of them are wrong.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Immorality: the morality of those who are having a better time.

Conscience is the inner voice that warns us that someone might be looking.

A cynic is a man who, when he smells flowers, looks around for a coffin.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart.

Communism, like any other revealed religion, is largely made up of prophecies.

It is impossible to imagine the universe run by a wise, just and omnipotent God, but it is quite easy to imagine it run by a board of gods.

A newspaper is a device for making the ignorant more ignorant and the crazy crazier.

God is a comedian, playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.

Criticism is prejudice made plausible.

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable. What he wants above everything else is safety.

Democracy is the art and science of running the circus from the monkey cage.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.