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.

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

Within any important issue, there are always aspects no one wishes to discuss.

A Socialist United States of Europe seems to me the only worth-while political objective today

I'd like to start a religion. That's where the money is.

Bad writers are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones.

Napoleon is always right.