Quotes from George Orwell

Glory of war, indeed! In war, all soldiers are lousy, at least when it is warm enough. The men who fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae -- every one of them had lice crawling over his testicles.

The Victorian happy ending– a vision of a huge loving family of three or four generations, all crammed together in the same house and constantly multiplying, like a bed of oysters.

the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism.

George Orwell on lefty/liberalism :- "the emotional shallowness of a left intelligentsia that lives in a world of ideas not reality, severed from the common culture of the country.

By itself," he said, "pain is not always enough. There are occasions when a human being will stand out against pain, even to the point of death. But for everyone there is something unendurable—something that cannot be contemplated.

Era uno de esos ensueños que, a pesar de utilizar toda la escenografía onírica habitual, son una continuación de nuestra vida intelectual y en los que nos damos cuenta de hechos e ideas que siguen teniendo un valor después del despertar.

the mere difficulty of getting hold of a house is one of the worst aggravations of poverty.

All the while, though I was technically in hiding, I could not feel myself in danger. The whole thing seemed too absurd. I had the ineradicable English belief that 'they' cannot arrest you unless you have broken the law. It is a most dangerous belief to have during a political pogrom.

No domínio da vida quotidiana afigurava-se, sem dúvida, necessário, pelo menos às vezes, reflectir antes de falar, mas um membro do Partido chamado a emitir um juízo político ou ético devia ser capaz de disparar as opiniões correctas tão automaticamente como uma metralhadora dispara balas.

Oye, cuantos más hombres hayas tenido más te quiero yo. ¿Lo comprendes?

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 centimeters inside your skull.

He found the original sheet of paper and scored the couplet out with thick lines. And in doing this there was a sense of achievement, of time not wasted, as though the destruction of much labour were in some way an act of creation.

It might very well be that literally every word in the history books, even the things that one accepted without question, was pure fantasy.

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp.

Who controls the present controls the past. Is it your opinion Winston, that the past has real existence? -O'Brien

One could not avoid it, but one could perhaps postpone it: and yet instead, every now and again, by a conscious, wilful act, one chose to shorten the interval before it happened.

There were things, your own acts, from which you could not recover. Something was killed in your breast; burnt out, cauterized out.

Si hay esperanza, le pertenece a los proles

The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism.

for everyone there is something unendurable - something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If you have come up from deep water it is not cowardly to fill your lungs with air. It is merely an instinct which cannot be disobeyed

Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother. THE END

La guerra es la guerra. El único ser humano bueno es el que ha muerto.»

A Socialist United States of Europe seems to me the only worth-while political objective today

Pacifism is a tenable position, provided that you are prepared to live with the consequences.