Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

[Political] prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance, this new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia but to keep the very structure of society intact.

We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now.

For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.

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

A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.