Quotes from George Orwell

Toda la propaganda de guerra, todos los gritos y mentiras y odio, provienen invariablemente de gente que no está peleando.»

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. Better than before, moreover, he realized why it was that he hated her. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless, because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so.

When there were no external records that you could refer to, even the outline of your own life lost its sharpness. You remembered huge events which had quite probably not happened, you remembered the detail of incidents without being able to recapture their atmosphere, and there were long blank periods to which you could assign nothing.

Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

The plan is, by a combination of fighting, bargaining and well-timed strokes of treachery, to acquire a ring of bases completely encircling one or other of the rival states, and then to sign a pact of friendship with that rival and remain on peaceful terms for so many years as to lull suspicion to sleep. During this time rockets loaded with atomic bombs can be assembled at all the strategic spots;

To the right of the speakwrite, a small pneumatic tube for written messages; to the left, a larger one for newspapers; and in the side wall, within easy reach of Winston's arm, a large oblong slit protected by a wire grating.

As a boy, it occurred to me, all people over 40 had seemed to me just worn-out old wrecks, so old that there was hardly any difference between them. A man of 45 had seemed to me older than this old dodderer of 65 seemed now. I was 45 myself. It frightened me.

His small but childish handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops:

Ä°nsan sevilmekten çok anla??lmay? istiyordu belki de.

By 'nationalism' I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled 'good' or 'bad'.¹ But secondly—and this is much more important—I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests.

Meanwhile nothing happened, nothing ever happened. The English had got into the habit of saying that this wasn't a war, it was a bloody pantomime. We were hardly under direct fire from the Fascists. The only danger was from stray bullets, which, as the lines curved forward on either side, came from several directions. All the casualties at this time were from strays. Arthur Clinton got a mysterious bullet that smashed his left shoulder and disabled his arm, permanently, I am afraid.

The reality was decaying, dingy cities, where underfed people shuffled to and fro in leaky shoes, in patched-up nineteenth-century houses

Revolutionary' discipline depends on political consciousness – on an understanding of why orders must be obeyed; it takes time to diffuse this, but it also takes time to drill a man into an automaton on the barrack-square.

If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, 85 per cent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.

But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength, would have no need to conspire.

La guerra la lleva a cabo cada grupo gobernante contra sus propios gobernados, y el objetivo de la guerra no es hacer o impedir conquistas territoriales, sino conservar intacta la estructura de la sociedad.

In foreign politics many intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by Britain must be in the wrong. As a result, 'enlightened' opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy. Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle, the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.

After knowing him I saw the force of the proverb "Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek, but don't trust an Armenian

What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.

When you have existed to the brink of middle age in bitter loneliness, among people your true opinion on every subject on earth is blasfemy, the need to talk is the greatest of all needs.

We are not content with negative obedience, nor even with the most abject submission. When finally you surrender to us, it must be of your own free will. we do not destroy the heretic because he resist us: so long as he resist us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul.

Se le persone non sanno scrivere bene allora non sanno pensare bene e se non sanno pensare bene altri penseranno per loro.

In a Party member, on the other hand, not even the smallest deviation of opinion on the most unimportant subject can be tolerated.

It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.