"When it is necessary they can be prodded into frenzies of fear and hatred, but when left to themselves they are capable of forgetting for long periods that the war is happening."

"England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly."

"The best books... are those that tell you what you know already."

"Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?"

"No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred."

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

"How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?Winston thought. "By making him suffer, he said."Exactly. By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own?..."

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

"One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think, as I thought then, that it is better to die violently and not too old."

"Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood."

"People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it."

"He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it."

"There is a humility about genuine love that is rather horrible in some ways."

"If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself."

"Writing a novel is agony."

"We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them."

"Spring, spring! Bytuene Mershe ant Averil, when spray biginneth to spring! When shaws be sheene and swards full fayre, and leaves both large and longe! When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces, in the spring time, the only pretty ring time, when the birds do sing, hey-ding-a-ding ding, cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-wee, ta-witta-woo! And so on and so on and so on. See almost any poet between the Bronze Age and 1805."

"For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life trying to impress the 'natives,' and so in every crisis he has got to do what the 'natives' expect of him... A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things."

"Page after page, advert after advert. Lipsticks, undies, tinned food, patent medicines, slimming cures, face-creams. A sort of cross-section of the money world. A panorama of ignorance, greed, vulgarity, snobbishness, whoredom and disease."

"To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization."

"The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth."

"In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible."

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

"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it."

"In a way, the world view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird."

"He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would never improve."

"The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies... Everywhere there is the same pyramidal structure, the same worship of semi-divine leader, the same economy existing by and for continuous warfare."

"The fact that has got to be faced is that to abolish class-distinctions means abolishing a part of yourself. Here am I, a typical member of the middle class. It is easy for me to say that I want to get rid of class-distinctions, but nearly everything I think and do is a result of class-distinctions. All my notions - notions of good and evil, of pleasant and unpleasant, of funny and serious, of ugly and beautiful - are essentially middle-class notions; my taste in books and food and clothes, my sense of honour, my table manners, my turns of speech, my accent, even the characteristic movements of my body, are the products of a special kind of upbringing and a special niche about half-way up the social hierarchy."

"Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception."

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

"Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion."

"The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals."

"Anyone who has used that comforting phrase 'a nice cup of tea' invariably means Indian tea."

"Winston stopped reading, chiefly in order to appreciate the fact that he was reading, in comfort and safety. He was alone: no telescreen, no ear at the keyhole, no nervous impulse to glance over his shoulder or cover the page with his hand. The sweet summer air played against his cheek. From somewhere far away there floated the faint shouts of children: in the room itself there was no sound except the insect voice of the clock. He settled deeper into the arm-chair and put his feet up on the fender. It was bliss, it was eternity."

"The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity."

"In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards."

"All the habits of Man are evil. And above all, no animal must ever tyrannise over his own kind. Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers. No animal must ever kill any other animal. All animals are equal."

"He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written."

"What now strikes as remarkable about the new moneyed class of the nineteenth century is their complete irresponsibility;they see everything in terms of individual success, with hardly any consciousness that the community exists."

"The whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish day-dream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also."

"War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."

"Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist?O'Brien: Of course he exists.Winston Smith: Does he exist like you or me?O'Brien: You do not exist."

"Liberal - a power worshipper without power."

"She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty years. At the end of it she was still singing."

"A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up the details..."

"If human equality is to be for ever averted - if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently - then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity."

"One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship."

"Money, money, all is money! Could you write even a penny novelette without money to put heart into you? Invention, energy, wit, style, charm--they've all got to be paid for in hard cash."

"Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there."

"It's the one thing they can't do. They can make you say anything " anything " but they can't make you believe it. They can't get inside you."