Quotes from George Orwell

The class-struggle is the main source of progress, and therefore the nobleman who robs the peasant and goads him to revolt is playing a necessary part, just as much as the Jacobin who guillotines the nobleman.

it was curious that he seemed not merely to have lost the power of expressing himself, but even forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say.

This edition is based on Orwell's typescript of November 1948, amended according to his proof corrections and taking in a few readings that are deemed to be his from the American first edition.

When it is necessary they can be prodded into frenzies of fear and hatred, but when left to themselves they are capable of forgetting for long periods that the war is happening.

The economy of many countries was allowed to stagnate, land went out of cultivation, capital equipment was not added to, great blocks of the population were prevented from working and kept half alive by State charity.

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

For whom, it suddenly occured to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn.

Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.

Dickens hardly writes of war, even to denounce it.

reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes; only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.

Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.

Two Minutes Hate

He seemed to have lost the power of intellectual effort, now that the stimulus of pain had been removed. He was not bored, he had no desire for conversation or distraction. Merely to be alone, not to be beaten or questioned, to have enough to eat, and to be clean all over, was completely satisfying. By degrees he came to spend less time in sleep, but he still felt no impulse to get off the bed.

Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?

But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.

Çürüyorsun, dedi; parça parça da??l?yorsun. Sen nesin, biliyor musun? Bir pislik torbas?. Åžu sana bakan ÅŸeyi görüyor musun? Son insan bu iÅŸte. Sen insansan, iÅŸte insanl?k bu. Åžimdi giy ÅŸu giysilerini bakal?m.

Goldstein and his heresies will live for ever. Every day, at every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, ridiculed, spat upon—and yet they will always survive.

The attitude of the Indian millionaires was similar. Gandhi called upon them to repent, and naturally they preferred him to the Socialists and Communists who, given the chance, would actually have taken their money away.

As a whole the world is more primitive today than it was fifty years ago. Certain backward areas have advanced, and various devices, always in some way connected with warfare and police espionage, have been developed, but experiment and invention have largely stopped, and the ravages of the atomic war of the Nineteen-fifties have never been fully repaired.

war hysteria is continuous and universal in all countries, and such acts as raping, looting, the slaughter of children, the reduction of whole populations to slavery, and reprisals against prisoners which extend even to boiling and burying alive, are looked upon as normal, and, when they are committed by one's own side and not by the enemy, meritorious. But

A smart hotel is a place where 100 people toil like devils in order that 200 may pay through the nose for things they do not really want.

Dodici voci si alzarono furiose, e tutte erano simili. Non c'era da chiedersi ora che cosa fosse successo al viso dei maiali. Le creature di fuori guardavano dal maiale all'uomo, dall'uomo al maiale e ancora dal maiale all'uomo, ma già era loro impossibile distinguere fra i due.

They can't get inside you,' she had said. But they could get inside you. 'What happens to you here is for ever

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible because there will be no words in which to express it.