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.
The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.
Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that evey sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.
He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.
You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.
When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.
The stars are a free show; it don’t cost anything to use your eyes.
I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.
Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.
Pacifism is objectively pro-Fascist.
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.
Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.
A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.
I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and the people can be trusted to behave decently if you will only let them alone.