It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.
The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.
The fight against bad English is not frivolous.
Some things ARE true, even though the party says they are true.
There is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.
Ignorance and prejudice are the ballast of our ship of state – however, ships without ballast are not seaworthy and cannot sail in the tempests, nor reach a safe harbor.
To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.
Preventive war is a crime not easily committed by a country that retains any traces of democracy.
Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.
I’m fat, but I’m thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there’s a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there’s a statue inside every block of stone?
Right thinking will be rewarded, wrong thinking punished.
If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver’s Travels among them.
I had been in London innumerable times, and yet till that day I had never noticed one of the worst things about London-the fact that it costs money even to sit down.
If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one. This does not always happen, but it is to be expected, and you ought not to complain if it does happen.
In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.
Man’s greatest drive is not love or hate but to change another person’s writing.
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.
The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside.
The hospital is the antechamber to the tomb.
From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned.