"There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all."

"But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him the horror was that he might also be wrong."

"Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent."

"Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull."

"In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable-what then?"

"Is it not crystal clear, then, comrades, that all the evils of this life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings?"

"The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency."

"What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself. Proles, it suddenly occurred to him, had remained in this condition. They were not loyal to a party or a country or an idea, they were loyal to one another."

"Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry."

"Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is possible that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never had much temptation to be human beings."

"Tolstoy does not necessarily get rid of his angry temperament by undergoing religious conversion, and indeed it is obvious that the illusion of having been reborn may allow one's native vices to flourish more freely than ever, though perhaps in subtler forms."

"Beyond the late Fifties everything faded. When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered the details of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing. Everything had been different then."

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

"Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice."

"Four legs good, two legs bad."

"TWO AND TWO MAKES FIVE."

"You are rotting away, you are falling to pieces. What are you? A bag of filth. Now turn around and look into that mirror again. Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity. Now put your clothes on again."

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

"If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them."

"Who controls the past controls the future who controls the present controls the past."

"Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

"After the sorts of winters we have had to endure recently, the spring does seem miraculous, because it has become gradually harder and harder to believe that it is actually going to happen. Every February since 1940 I have found myself thinking that this time winter is going to be permanent. But Persephone, like the toads, always rises from the dead at about the same moment. Suddenly, towards the end of March, the miracle happens and the decaying slum in which I live is transfigured."

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

"The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous. The essential act of modern warfare is the destruction of the produce of human labour. A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. In principle, the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects, and its object is not victory over Eurasia or Eastasia, but to keep the very structure of society intact."Julia? Are you awake? There is truth, and there is untruth. To be in a minority of one doesn't make you mad."

"The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different."

"Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you; not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed."

"Don't you enjoy being alive? Don't you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I'm real, I'm solid, I'm alive! Don't you like this?"

"He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone - one mind less, one world less."

"There were only four dissentients, the three dogs and the cat, who was afterwards discovered to have voted on both sides."

"He was abusing Big Brother, he was denouncing the dictatorship of the Party, he was demanding the immediate conclusion of peace with Eurasia, he was advocating freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, he was crying hysterically that the revolution had been betrayed - and all this in rapid polysyllabic speech which was a sort of parody of the habitual style of the orators of the Party, and even contained Newspeak words: more Newspeak words, indeed, than any Party member would normally use in real life."

"We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it."

"The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?"

"All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting."

"There was a direct intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account. They had played a similar trick with the instinct of parenthood. The family could not actually be abolished, and, indeed, people were encouraged to be fond of their children, in almost the old-fashioned way."

"Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious."

"The Brotherhood cannot be wiped out because it is not an organization in the ordinary sense. Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible."

"Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism."

"Poverty is spiritual halitosis."

"No doubt alcohol tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must avoid but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid."

"No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy."

"For money buys all virtues. Money suffereth long and is kid, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her own."

"Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea."

"For a creative writer possession of the "truth" is less important than emotional sincerity."

"The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history."

"The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim-for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives -is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal."

"You don't want to have any pity on these here tramps " scum, they are. You don't want to judge them by the same standards as men like you and me. They're scum, just scum.' It was interesting to see the subtle way in which he disassociated himself from 'these here tramps'. He had been on the road six months, but in the sight of God, he seemed to imply, he was not a tramp. I imagine there are quite a lot of tramps who thank God they are not tramps. They are like the trippers who say such cutting things about trippers."

"We are not interested in those stupid crimes you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about."

"For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live."

"I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure."

"In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money."