He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable

He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.

Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated into a machine called a Speakwrite. Winston would receive articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, in Newspeak, rectify. If, for example, the Ministry of Plenty forecast a surplus, and in reality the result was grossly less, Winston's job was to change previous versions so the old version would agree with the new one.

Snobbishness, like hypocrisy, is a check upon behaviour whose value from a social point of view has been underrated.

Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.