George Orwell Quotes (283 Quotes)

A hideous ecstasy of fear and vindictiveness, a desire to kill, to torture, to smash faces in with a sledge hammer, seemed to flow through the whole group of people like an electric current, turning one even against one's will into a grimacing, screaming lunatic. And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.

For the first time he perceived that if you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.

In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards.

Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible.

She had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was most important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war fever and leader worship.

The old civilisations claimed that they were founded on love and justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy - everything.

To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone- to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink - greetings!

You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.

Some hams hanging in the kitchen were taken out for burial

A lunatic is just a minority of one.

For the future. For the unborn.

In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty years. At the end of it she was still singing.

The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.

Tragedy, he precieved, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.

You think-I dare say that our chief job is inventing new words. But not a bit of it We're destroying words-scores of them hundreds of them every day. It's a beautiful thing the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn't only the synonyms there are also the antonyms.

Surely, comrades, you don't want Jones back?

Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated.

For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.

In moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one's own body.

Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible.

She was very young...she still expected something from life, she did not understand that to push an inconvenient person over a cliff solves nothing.

The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.

War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking into the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comforable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.

You were the dead; theirs was the future.

The only good human being is a dead one.

Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull.

From now onwards he must not only think right; he must feel right, dream right. And all the while he must keep his hatred locked up inside him like a ball of matter which was part of himself and yet unconnected with the rest of him, a kind of cyst.

In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four.

Now that they had a secure hiding place almost a home it did not even seem a hardship that they could only meet infrequently and for a couple of hours at a time. What mattered was that the room should exist. To know that it was there inviolate was almost the same as being in it.

Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in as in their rectified version

The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed. And in practice the only way of achieving this was by continuous warfare.

We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing.

You will see me, where there is no darkness.

This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.

And even when they become discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.

From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.

In principle a Party member had no spare time, and was never alone except in bed. It was assumed that when he was not working, eating, or sleeping he would be taking part in some kind of communal recreations; to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife, it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity.

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.

Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.

The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.

We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.

You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity.

Tutti gli animali sono uguali, ma alcuni sono più uguali degli altri

And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?

He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable

In the face of pain there are no heroes.

One question at any rate was answered. Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain. 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, no heroes, he thought over and over as he writhed on the floor, clutching uselessly at his disabled left arm.

That the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail cowardly creatures who could not endure liberty or face the truth, and must be ruled over and systematically deceived by others who were stronger than themselves. That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.