‚1984‘ is not a wonder tale. Not only could it happen, but it has happened, but under different names.

I don’t think the Tea Party people are racist, except maybe a tiny portion of them. But there has been a deliberate effort – again, referring to Fox Broadcasting – to inject the race issue into it. They have actually called Obama a racist on television.

A typical vice of American politics is the avoidance of saying anything real on real issues.

George Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I’m 100 percent fiction writer… I don’t want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don’t state my political messages to anybody.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.

People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.

If I studied all my life, I couldn’t think up half the number of funny things passed in one session of congress.

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

The society in ‚The Handmaid’s Tale‘ is a throwback to the early Puritans whom I studied extensively at Harvard under Perry Miller, to whom the book is dedicated.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

You know, if I listened to Michael Dukakis long enough, I would be convinced we’re in an economic downturn and people are homeless and going without food and medical attention and that we’ve got to do something about the unemployed.

With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. You know all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, and he’s like, yeah, he’s sure he can control the demon? Doesn’t work out.

The totalitarian, to me, is the enemy – the one that’s absolute, the one that wants control over the inside of your head, not just your actions and your taxes.

Well, I’m in my 60s now. I finally look it, I think. People until I was 60 would always say they thought I looked younger, which I think, without flattering myself, I did, but I think I certainly have, as George Orwell says people do after a certain age, the face they deserve.

There is no fool like a careless gambler who starts taking victory for granted.

Liberalism is totalitarianism with a human face.

Anti-Americanism is a pure totalitarian concept. The very notion is idiotic.

Prepare for death, if here at night you roam, and sign your will before you sup from home.

Never accept a drink from a urologist.

Big Brother is watching you.

If the Soviet Union let another political party come into existence, they would still be a one-party state, because everybody would join the other party.

I think the War on Terror is really absurd, especially coming from a country that is founded on terrorism.

There ought to be one day – just one – when there is open season on senators.

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship.

Patriot: the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about.

I used to wish there was a useful term for those of us who thought American power should be used to remove psychopathic dictators.

If you must hold yourself up to your children as an object lesson, hold yourself up as a warning and not as an example.

You could tell ‚The Handmaid’s Tale‘ from a male point of view. People have mistakenly felt that the women are oppressed, but power tends to organise itself in a pyramid. I could pick a male narrator from somewhere in that pyramid. It would interesting.

Four legs good, two legs bad.

Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.