If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.

It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.

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

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.

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

What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.