Quotes from George Orwell

Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax.

Su abrazo había sido una batalla, el clímax una victoria. Era un golpe contra el Partido. Era un acto político.

Si pueden obligarme a dejarte de amar... ésa sería la verdadera traición

A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims, but accomplices.

If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope.

But the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.

The POUM] posters, designed for a wider public (posters are important in Spain, with its large illiterate population).

I hate purity, I hate goodness, I don't want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.

El pasado es únicamente lo que digan los testimonios escritos y la memoria humana.

He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken.

Collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamed of. ... By bringing the whole of life under the control of the State, Socialism necessarily gives power to an inner ring of bureaucrats, who in almost every case will be men who want power for its own sake and will stick at nothing in order to retain it.

it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones:

What's the good of trying to revisit the scenes of your boyhood? They don't exist. Comping up for air! But there isn't any air. The dustbin that we're in reaches up to the stratosphere.

La consigna de todos los despotismos era: No harás esto o lo otro. La voz de mando de los totalitarios era: Harás esto o aquello. Nuestra orden es: Eres

Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes, no heroes, he thought over and over as he writhed on the floor, clutching uselessly at his disabled left arm.

After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself.

As time went on, the Communists and the POUM wrote more bitterly about one another than about the Fascists.

A slave, Marcus Cato said, should be working when he is not sleeping. It does not matter whether his work is needed or not, he must work, because work in itself is good—for slaves, at least. This sentiment still survives, and it has piled up mountains of useless drudgery.

Su madre tenía una especie de nobleza sólo por el hecho de regirse por normas privadas. Los sentimientos de ella eran realmente suyos y no los que el estado le mandaba tener.

Nothing in the world is quite so irritating as dealing with mutinous children.

In this place you could not feel anything, except pain and foreknowledge of pain.

The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His

Certainly the Andalusians were very ignorant. Few if any of them could read, and they seemed not even to know the one thing that everybody knows in Spain—which political party they belonged to. They thought they were Anarchists, but were not quite certain; perhaps they were Communists.

There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed.