We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.

Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power.

Literature is doomed if liberty of thought perishes.

People invent new machines and improve existing ones almost unconsciously, rather as a Somnambulist will go walking in his sleep. The interesting puzzle in our times is that we so willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence.

When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash.

Snobbishness, like hypocrisy, is a check upon behaviour whose value from a social point of view has been underrated.