Freedom is the right to tell others what they don't want to hear.

If you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet and a drunken midwife-not exactly a representative cross-section of the English working class.

[...] you can get anything in this world if you genuinely don't want it.

The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering-a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons-a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting-three hundred million people all with the same face.

In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.

It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.

The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.