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

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.

In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.

In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards.

Modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

they say that time heals all things, they say you can always forget; but the smiles and the tears across the years they twist my heart strings yet!