The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.

From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.