It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack on morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise.

One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.

If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any practical result whatsoever, you've beaten them.

I watched him [a 'fat Russian agent'] with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies -- unless one counts journalists.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.

Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.