Quotes from George Orwell

Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.

I understood HOW: I do not understand WHY.

Life's here to be lived, and if we're going to be in the soup next week - well, next week is a long way off.

I tell you I can't be bothered with things like that. I've got a soul above buttons.

Is it not crystal clear, then, comrades, that all the evils of this life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings?

The food we were given was no more than eatable, but the patron was not mean about drink; he allowed us two litres of wine a day each, knowing that if a plongeur is not given two litres he will steal three.

Never use the passive where you can use the active.

In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.

We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.

They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.

That is her style of beauty.

I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.

Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

A person of bourgeois origin goes through life with some expectation of getting what he wants, within reasonable limits. Hence the fact thjat in times of stress educated people tend to come to the front; they are no more gifted than the others and their education is generally quite useless in itself, but they are accustomed to a certain amount of deference and consequently have the cheek necessary to a commander.

the people will not revolt. They will not look up from their screens

What was happening was only the working-out of a process that had started years ago. The first step had been a secret, involuntary thought, the second had been the opening of the diary. He had moved from thoughts to words, and now from words to actions. The last step was something that would happen in the Ministry of Love. He had accepted it. The end was contained in the beginning.

At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation.

Si la libertad significa algo, será, sobre todo, el derecho a decirle a la gente aquello que no quiere oír.»

And the whole huge town of a million people was locked in a sort of violent inertia, a nightmare of noise without movement.

it is perhaps one's own fault, to see oneself drifting, rotting, in dishonour and horrible futility, and all the while knowing that somewhere within one there is the possibility of a decent human being.

This is the inevitable fate of the sentimentalist. All his opinions change into their opposites at the first brush of reality.

Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting. It was quite simple. All that was needed was an unending series of victories over your own memory. 'Reality control', they called it: in Newspeak, 'doublethink'.

And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who 'objectively' endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words, defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought.

It is as though in the middle of a chess tournament one competitor should suddenly begin screaming that the other is guilty of arson or bigamy. The point that is really at issue remains untouched. Libel settles nothing...