We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.

The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a physical necessity.

You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity.

There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live-did live, from habit that became instinct-in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.

I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.