Quotes from George Orwell

The distinguishing mark of man is the hand, the instrument with which he does all his mischief.

The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.

He wondered vaguely how many others like here there might be in the younger generation, people who had grown up in the world of the Revolution, knowing nothing else, accepting the Party as something unalterable, like the sky, not rebelling against its authority but simply evading it, as a rabbit dodges a dog.

He had reached the age when the future ceases to be a rosy blur and becomes actual and menacing.

For the future. For the unborn.

Perhaps it is only when people are somewhere near the starvation level that they have anything to sing about.

I'm not interested in the next generation, dear. I'm interested in us .' - Julia

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

It was one of those dreams which, while retaining the characteristic dream scenery, are a continuation of one's intellectual life, and in which one becomes aware of facts and ideas which still seem new and valuable after one is awake.

To write books you need not only comfort and solitude—and solitude is never easy to attain in a working-class home—you also need piece of mind. You can't settle in to anything, you can't command the spirit of hope in which anything has got to be created, with that dull evil cloud of unemployment hanging over you.

All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary. In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place.

You were the dead; theirs was the future.

Men are infinitely malleable.

Page after page, advert after advert. Lipsticks, undies, tinned food, patent medicines, slimming cures, face-creams. A sort of cross-section of the money world. A panorama of ignorance, greed, vulgarity, snobbishness, whoredom and disease.

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men. If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear. In times of universal deceit, telling the truth will be a revolutionary act.

I was said of these bombs (referring to FAI bombs) that they were 'impartial'; they killed then man they were thrown at and the man who threw them.

On the one hand you have the warm-hearted unthinking Socialist, the typical working-class Socialist, who only wants to abolish poverty and does not always grasp what this implies. On the other hand, you have the intellectual, book-trained Socialist, who understands that it is necessary to throw our present civilisation down the sink and is quite willing to do so.

And yet he was in the right! They were wrong and he was right. The obvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truisms are true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its laws do not change. Stones are hard, water is wet, objects unsupported fall towards the earth's centre.

for, after all, we have nothing to lose but our aitches.

The Rue du Coq d'Or, Paris, seven in the morning.

It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.

He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable. What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side?

But now and then there appears a novel which opens up a new world not by revealing what is strange, but by revealing what is familiar.

Mrs Weaver nosed among the books, too dim-witted to grasp that they were in alphabetical order.