Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
In the face of pain there are no heroes.
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
But it was alright, everything was alright, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
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.
The main motive for nonattachment is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.
We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.
Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.
So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.
Within any important issue, there are always aspects no one wishes to discuss.
Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.
Liberal: a power worshipper without power.
Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
Rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon – so long as there is no answer to it – gives claws to the weak.
Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing.