Quotes from George Orwell

It was like an allegorical picture of war; the trainload of fresh men gliding proudly up the line, the maimed men sliding slowly down, and all the while the guns on the open trucks making one's heart leap as guns always do, and reviving that pernicious feeling, so difficult to get rid of, that war is glorious after all.

One prod to the nerve of nationalism and the intellectual decencies can vanish, the past can be altered, and the plainest facts can be denied.

When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness.

The people chased the Conservative candidate half a mile and threw him into a pond full of duckweed. People took politics seriously in those days. They used to begin storing up rotten eggs weeks before an election.

Los mejores libros son los que nos dicen lo que ya sabemos

inequality was the unalterable law of human life.

Il réfléchit qu'il était déjà mort. Il lui apparut que c'était seulement lorsqu'il avait commencé à être capable de formuler ses idées qu'il avait fait le pas décisif. Les conséquences d'un acte sont incluses dans l'acte lui-même. Il écrivit : Le crime de penser n'entraîne pas la mort. Le crime de penser est la mort.

All past oligarchies have fallen from power either because they ossified or because they grew soft. Either they became stupid and arrogant, failed to adjust themselves to changing circumstances, and were overthrown; or they became liberal and cowardly, made concessions when they should have used force, and once again were overthrown.

Below that are the proles, numbering perhaps eight-five per cent of the population. In terms of our earlier classification, the proles are the Low, for the slave population of the equatorial lands, who pass constantly from conqueror to conqueror, are not a permanent or necessary part of the structure.

In theory at any rate each militia was a democracy and not a hierarchy . It was understood that orders had to be obeyed, but it was also understood that when you gave an order you gave it as comrade to comrade and not as superior to inferior. There were officers and NCOs, but there was no military rank in the ordinary sense; not titles, no badges, no heel-clicking and saluting. They had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of the classless society.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

It was all nonsense, as they both knew. In reality there was no escape. Even the one plan that was practicable, suicide, they had no intention of carrying out. To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.

It is impossible to found a civilisation on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.

how men, when given power over other men, start to behave like pigs.

When one says that a writer is fashionable one practically always means that he is admired by people under thirty.

and it is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life

In theory it is still possible to be an orthodox religious believer without being intellectually crippled in the process.

While freely conceding that the Soviet regime exhibits certain features which the humanitarian may be inclined to deplore, we must, I think, agree that a certain curtailment of the right to political opposition is an unavoidable concomitant of transitional periods, and that the rigors which the Russian people have been called upon to undergo have been amply justified in the sphere of concrete achievement.

Society was ruled by narrow-minded, profoundly incurious people, predatory business men, dull squires, bishops, politicians who could quote Horace but had never heard of algebra. Science was faintly disreputable and religious belief obligatory. Traditionalism, stupidity, snobbishness, patriotism, superstition and love of war seemed to be all on the same side; there was need of someone who could state the opposite point of view.

The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same.

Na bojnom polju, u mu?ilištu, na brodu koji tone, razlozi zbog kojih se boriš uvijek se zaborave jer se tijelo nadimlje sve dok ne ispuni cijeli tvoj svemir, pa ?ak i onda kad te nije paralizirao strah ili ne vrištiš od boli, život je od trenutka do trenutka, samo borba protiv gladi ili hladno?e ili sna, protiv pokvarena želuca ili zuba koji boli.

To mark the paper was the decisive act.

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.

From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.