The pleasures of spring are available to everybody and cost nothing.

It's not so much staying alive, it's staying human that's important. What counts is that we don't betray each other.

Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist? O'Brien: Of course he exists. Winston Smith: Does he exist like you or me? O'Brien: You do not exist.

Power is not a means; it is an end.

To say "I accept" in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration-camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas-masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press-censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murder.

In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four.

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.