... what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be told truthfully.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?

A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.