"Intellectual honesty is a crime in any totalitarian country; but even in England it is not exactly profitable to speak and write the truth."

from Fascism and Decomcracy

The Left News, (February 1941)

"In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions but they are very powerful illusions."

from The Lion and The Unicorn 

(February 1941)

"Art and propaganda are never quite separable."

Literary Criticism II : Tolstoy and Shakespeare

broadcast 7 May 1941

The Listener, 5 June 1941

"What is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be trutfully written."

from Looking Back on the Spanish War (1943)

"The imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity."

from The Prevention of Literature

Polemic, January 1946

The Atlantic Monthly,

"Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudly vagueness."

from Politics and the English Language

Payments Book, 11 December 1945

Horizon, April 1946

"Who controls the past, controls the future, who controls the present, controls the past."

from Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)

"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four."

from Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)