Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.

The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.

We have become too civilized to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those who don't take the sword perish by smelly diseases.

It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself-anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face ... was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime.

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

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.

Writing a novel is agony.