One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

I managed to get my copy of Ulysses through safely this time. I rather wish I had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production.

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war...war had literally been continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil.

Politics is the choice between the lesser of two evils.

...men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.

That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.