Some hams hanging in the kitchen were taken out for burial

Sheer egoism... Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen - in short, with the whole top crust of humanity.

We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future.

Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.

. . . it is a corrupting thing to live one's real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it.

Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other.

The human beings did not hate Animal Farm any less now that it was prospering; indeed, they hated it more than ever.