Quotes from George Orwell

Morir odiándolos [al Partido], ésa era la libertad.

Eles não podem alterar os sentimentos... aliás, nem nós próprios poderíamos alterá-los, mesmo que quiséssemos. Podiam pôr a nu, com todo o pormenor, quanto houvéramos feito, dito ou pensado; mas o mais fundo do coração, cujo funcionamento até para nós constitui um mistério, há-de ser sempre inexpugnável.

So often like this, in lonely places in the forest, he would come upon something--bird, flower, tree--beautiful beyond all words, if there had been a soul with whom to share it. Beauty is meaningless until it is shared.

Antiguamente, las diferencias de clase no sólo habían sido inevitables, sino deseables. La desigualdad era el precio de la civilización.

The book fascinated him, or more exactly it reassured him. In a sense, it told him nothing that was new, but that was part of the attraction. It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order.

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way about. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender them.

The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. We do not merely destroy our enemies, we change them.

For how could you establish even the most obvious fact when there existed no record outside your own memory?

but any writer who adopts the totalitarian outlook, who finds excuses for persecution and the falsification of reality, thereby destroys himself as a writer. There is no way out of this. No tirades against 'individualism' and 'the ivory tower', no pious platitudes to the effect that 'true individuality is only attained through identification with the community', can get over the fact that a bought mind is a spoiled mind

I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

You do not exist. I think I exist. I am conscious of my own identity. I was born, and I shall die. I have arms and legs. I occupy a particular point in space. No other solid object can occupy the same point simultaneously.

It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same—everywhere, all over the world, hundreds of thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same—people

And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings.

But there is also the minority of gifted, wilful people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class. Serious writers, I should say, are on the whole more vain and self-centred than journalists, though less interested in money.

The earth is as old as we are, no older. How could it be older? Nothing exists except through human consciousness.

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

Nearly all soldiers, and this applies even to professional soldiers in peacetime, have a sane attitude towards war. They realise that it is disgusting, and that it may often be necessary

I dreamed I dwelt in marble halls, And woke to find it true; I wasn't born for an age like this; Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?

He is fiddling while Rome is burning, and, unlike the enormous majority of people who do this, fiddling with his face toward the flames.

Cut off from contact with the outer world, and with the past, the citizen of Oceania is like a man in interstellar space, who has no way of knowing which direction is up and which is down. The rulers of such a state are absolute, as the Pharaohs or the Caesars could not be.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.

And yet it was a fact that if Syme grasped, even for three seconds, the nature of his, Winston's, secret opinions, he would betray him instantly to the Thought Police. So would anybody else for that matter: but Syme more than most. Zeal was not enough. Orthodoxy was unconsciousness.

But after reading it he knew better than before that he was not mad. Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.