Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose.
Power is not a means; it is an end.
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.
One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.
Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.
If there really is such a thing as turning in one’s grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.
Tragedy, he precieved, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.
No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.
He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed.
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.