All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery.

Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges.

It was not the man's brain that was speaking; it was his larynx.

Does Big Brother exist?" "Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party." "Does he exist in the same way as I exist?" "You do not exist.

The birds sang, the proles sang. the Party did not sing. All round the world, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil, and in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and Japan — everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing.

History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

When I joined the militia I had promised myself to kill one Fascist - after all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct.