Quotes from George Orwell

Mientras los humanos sigan siendo humanos, la vida y la muerte seran la misma cosa

I suppose we may as well say goodbye.

Women who do not marry wither up - they wither up like aspidistras in back-parlour windows; and the devilish thing is that they don't even know they're withering.

Les meilleurs livres sont ceux qui racontent ce que l'on sait déjà.

Å»y? nawet tak, z dnia na dzieÅ" i z tygodnia na tydzieÅ", wci?? w tera?niejszoÅ›ci i bez ?adnych widoków na przyszÅ'o??, nakazywaÅ' im instynkt równie niemo?liwy do przezwyci??enia jak ten, który wprawia w ruch pÅ'uca, dopóki w powietrzu jest cho? odrobina tlenu.

Vous ne possédez rien, en dehors des quelques centimètres cubes de votre crâne.

Kochany, nie obchodzÄ… mnie nastÄ™pne pokolenia! Mnie chodzi o nas dwoje! - JesteÅ› buntownikiem tylko od pasa w dóÅ' - stwierdziÅ'

The Party intellectual knows in which direction his memories must be altered; he therefore knows that he is playing tricks with reality; but by the exercise of doublethink he also satisfies himself that reality is not violated.

Il y a partout la même structure pyramidale, le même culte d'un chef semi-divin, le même système économique existant par et pour une guerre continuelle.

We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You

He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone - one mind less, one world less.

Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold.

All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

What now strikes as remarkable about the new moneyed class of the nineteenth century is their complete irresponsibility;they see everything in terms of individual success, with hardly any consciousness that the community exists.

It is a fact that any rich man, unless he is a Jew, has less to fear from Fascism than from either Communism or democratic Socialism.

this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man's brain that was speaking, it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.

Whenever A is oppressing B, it is clear to people of good will that B ought to be independent, but then it always turns out that there is another group C, which is anxious to be independent of B. The question is how large must a minority be before it deserves autonomy.

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system

England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.

But what a way to do things-never to perform a decent action until you are kicked into it and the rest of the world has ceased to believe that your motives can possibly be honest.

What mattered was that the room over the junk-shop should exist. To know that it was there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it. The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.

You are rotting away. You are falling to pieces. What are you? A bag of filth. Now turn round and look into that mirror again. Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity.

We sleep soundly in our beds, because rough men stand ready in the night to do violence on those who would harm us Orwell cited Kipling's phrase making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep (Kipling, Tommy), and further noted that Kipling's grasp of function, of who protects whom, is very sound. He sees clearly that men can be highly civilized only while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them. (1942)

To dislike a writer's politics is one thing. To dislike him because he forces you to think is another, not necessarily incompatible with the first.