Quotes from George Orwell

The scene had interested me. It was so different from the ordinary demeanour of tramps--from the abject worm-like gratitude with which they normally accept charity. The explanation, of course, was that we outnumbered the congregation and so were not afraid of them. A man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor--it is a fixed characteristic of human nature; and, when he has fifty or a hundred others to back him, he will show it.

The outcry against killing women, if you accept killing at all, is sheer sentimentality. Why is it worse to kill a woman than a man?

Now and again I go out at night and watch for meteors. The stars are a free show; it don't cost anything to use your eyes.

We are the dead . Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone.

But when war becomes literally continuous, it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded. As we have seen, researches that could be called scientific are still carried out for the purposes of war, but they are essentially a kind of daydreaming, and their failure to show results is not important. Efficiency, even military efficiency, is no longer needed.

We are the dead.

He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one... He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, a lunatic. But the though of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be wrong.

Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop

He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed. It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one's own body.

Socialism does mean justice and liberty when the nonsense is stripped off it.

It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.

It is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during 'God save the King' than of stealing from a poor box

I betrayed you,' she said baldly. 'I betrayed you,' he said.

For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken. If human equality is to be forever averted—if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently—then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.

Bugünlerde fikir sahibi herkes korkudan kaskat? kesiliyor.

Essentially, a 'smart' hotel is a place where a hundred people toil like devils in order that two hundred may pay through the nose for things they do not really want.

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth.

I am walking up and down the line of sentries, under the dark boughs of the poplars. In the flooded ditch outside the rats are paddling about, making as much noise as otters. As the yellow dawn comes up behind us, the Andalusian sentry, muffled in his cloak, begins singing. Across no-man's-land, a hundred or two hundred yards away, you can hear the Fascist sentry also singing.

If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then?

Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for non-attachment is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.

ÅžiirmiÅŸ! Nedir ÅŸiir? Alt taraf? bir ses, havada küçük bir girdap. Bir de-Tanr?m!- makineli tüfeklere kar?? ne faydas? olabilirdi?

The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right.

Chúng (b?n súc v?t) nhìn l?n r?i l?i nhìn ng??i, nhìn ng??i r?i l?i nhìn l?n, má»™t lúc sau thì chúng ch?u, không th? phân bi?t ???c Ä'âu là ng??i, Ä'âu là l?n n?a.

Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed--no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.