Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.

Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.

Reality is inside the skull.

Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

I was on the point of breaking off the conversation, for nothing puts me so completely out of patience as the utterance of a wretched commonplace when I am talking from my inmost heart.

They blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.

Clearly, his winks were some sort of superpower, because I swear that if he asked me to jump from the roof of a tall building and then winked, I’d jump.

Love me, then, or hate me, as you will," I said at last, "you have my full and free forgiveness: ask now for God's, and be at peace.

A democracy without faith is just a machine without power. Nothing can make it function except faith in itself, in the ordinary man and woman.

If you tell the truth, then you don't have to have a good memory

If I could have gave more, I would have done it. I gave everything I had

Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants? I intend to do battle with them and slay them.

My parents were worried about me, certainly when I became so deeply interested in music and people like the New York Dolls who, at the time, were very peculiar indeed.

If you know what you want, you can find a way to get it.