The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

The animals were happy as they had never conceived it possible to be. Every mouthful of food was an acute positive pleasure, now that it was truly their own food, produced by themselves and for themselves, not doled out to them by a grudging master.

Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.

Rich people are poor people with money.

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.