Quotes from George Orwell

what can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself?

All Spaniards, we discovered, knew two English expressions. One was 'OK, baby,' the other was a word used by the Barcelona whores in their dealings with English sailors, and I am afraid the compositors would not print it.

The girl from the fiction department… was looking at him [Winston]… She was very young, he thought, she still expected something from life… She would not accept it as a law of nature that the individual is always defeated… All you needed was luck and cunning and boldness. She did not understand that there was no such thing as happiness, that the only victory lay in the far future, long after you were dead.

When these images clash—as in The Fascist octupus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot—it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking.

Rudyard Kipling was the only popular writer of this century who was not at the same time a thoroughly bad writer.

It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life

Always yell with the crowd, that's what I say. It's the only way to be safe.

Happiness can exist only in acceptance. – George Orwell

In the quiet back streets of Lérida and Barbastro I seemed to catch a momentary glimpse, a sort of far-off rumour of the Spain that dwells in everyone's imagination. White sierras, goatherds, dungeons of the Inquisition, Moorish palaces, black winding trains of mules, grey olive trees and groves of lemons, girls in black mantillas, the wines of Málaga and Alicante, cathedrals, cardinals, bull-fights, gypsies, serenades—in short, Spain.

War, for all its evil, is at any rate an unanswerable test of strength, like a try-your-grip machine. Great strength returns the penny, and there is no way of faking the result.

Something in his face deeply moved me. It was the face of a man who would commit murder and throw away his life for a friend – the kind of face you would expect in an Anarchist, though as likely as not he was a Communist.

War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair.

Only small sums were actually paid out, the winners of the big prizes being non-existent persons. In the absence of any real intercommunication between one part of Oceania and another, this was not difficult to arrange.

People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it.

Above all, there was a belief in the revolution and the future, a feeling of having suddenly emerged into an era of equality and freedom.

That was above all what he wanted to hear. Not merely the love of one person but the animal instinct, the simple undifferentiated desire. That was the force that would tear the Party to pieces.

A few whiskies in dull bars, a visit or tow to the Empire promenade, a little whoring on the Q.T.; the sort of dingy, drabby fornications that you can imagine happening between Egyptian mummies after the museum is closed for the night.

What kind of people would control this world had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians. These people, whose origins lay in the salaried middle class and the upper grades of the working class, had been shaped and brought together by the barren world of monopoly industry and centralised government.

He is simply a hole in the air.

The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside.

to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing.

And even when they became discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances.

In practice the democratic 'revolutionary' type of discipline is more reliable than might be expected.