And the bigger the fall, the bigger the joke. It would be better fun to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at a curate.

It was with the last revolution and the coming of INGSOC (Inglish/English Socialism) that the latest High learnt how to keep their position permanently - by cultivating ignorance among the other classes and by constantly surveying them through the Thought Police. Part of this strategy included the maintenance of a state of continual warfare, which Goldstein discussed in the third chapter. The three major powers were not fighting this perpetual war for victory; they were fighting to keep a state of emergency always present as the surest guarantee of authoritarianism.

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, but then fail all the more completely because he drinks.

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.

Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99 % of the population exist.

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

Never have ideas about children, and never have ideas for them.