Winston could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war...war had literally been continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil.

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which any Party intellectual would overthrow him in debate, the subtle arguments which he would not be able to understand, much less answer. And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right.

Despotic governments can stand 'moral force' till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.

In this country, intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face ... Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and incovenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban ... At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of iedas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.

I understand HOW. I do not understand WHY

He [Gandhi] was not one of those saints who are marked out by their phenomenal piety from childhood onwards, nor one of the other kind who forsake the world after sensational debaucheries.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are only 'doing their duty'