Human beings were behaving as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.

When you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for this reason that I don't mix much in literary circles, because I know from experience that once I have met and spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to feel any intellectual brutality towards him, even when I feel I ought to - like the Labour M.P.s who get patted on the back by dukes and are lost forever more.

The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle, hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or laborer's cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.

Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose

The modern writer who has influenced me most is W. Somerset Maugham .

History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.