He would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies.

To be corrupted by totalitarianism, one does not have to live in a totalitarian country.

The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover, against his will, what another human being is thinking, and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand.

Truth becomes untruth if uttered by your enemy

Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Oglivy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence... Comrade Oglivy, who had never existed in the present, now existed in the past, and when once the act of forgery was forgotten, he would exist just as authentically, and upon the same evidence, as Charlemagne or Julius Caesar.

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.