He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights. 'White to play and mate in two moves.' Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates.

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money frees people from work.

It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children

The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned.