A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies. If they chose they could blow the Party to pieces tomorrow morning. Surely sooner or later it must occur to them to do it? And yet --!

For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things.

The typical socialist... a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaler and often with vegetarian leanings.