This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.
If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, "I'm a free man in here" - he tapped his forehead - "and you're all right.
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. He sets them to work, he gives back to
Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.
Until they become conscious, they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled, they cannot become conscious.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.
Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.