Quote collection
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"From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party: WAR IS PEACE FREEDOM IS SLAVERY IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH."
"Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated into a machine called a Speakwrite. Winston would receive articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, in Newspeak, rectify. If, for example, the Ministry of Plenty forecast a surplus, and in reality the result was grossly less, Winston's job was to change previous versions so the old version would agree with the new one."
"The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition."
"Bad writers are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones."
"No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy."
"A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics'. All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. When the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer."
"The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped."
"To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others."
"But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother."
"...the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war."
"Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing."
"We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them."
"Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly, there is nothing left but quietism - robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it."
"The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you do?’, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions."
"The pleasures of spring are available to everybody and cost nothing."
"In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money."
"How could you communicate with the future? It was impossible. Either the future would resemble the present in which case it would not listen to him, or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless."
"Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end."
"Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you."
"Imperialism as he [Kipling] sees it is a sort of forcible evangelising."