It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.

The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

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.

In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?