Quotes from George Orwell

It was bliss, it was eternity

But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen.

Only child life is real life.

Don't you see that the whole aim of newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?

He had written it down at last, but it made no difference. The therapy had not worked.

It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against ones body.

It had long been realised that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism.

More than anyone else, perhaps, the miner can stand as the type of the manual worker, not only because his work is so exaggeratedly awful, but also because it is so vitally necessary and yet so remote from our experience, so invisible, as it were, that we are capable of forgetting it as we forget the blood in our veins.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection … that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals.

Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad.

They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect.

We say that a man's dead when his heart stops and not before. It seems a bit arbitrary. After all, parts of your body don't stop working-hair goes on growing for years, for instance. Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.

There was a sort of calculating ferocity in the boy's eye, a quite evident desire to hit or kick Winston and a consciousness of being very nearly big enough to do so.

From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of double- think- Greetings!

Sooner or later it would happen: strength would change into consciousness.

All nationalistic distinctions -- all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect -- are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people believe in them.

A man receiving charity practically always hates his benefactor -- it is a fixed characteristic of human nature; and, when he has fifty or a hundred others to back him, he will show it.

The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim—for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives—is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.

This process of con- tinuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs—to every kind of lit- erature or documentation which might conceivably hold any political or ideological significance. Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date.

Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly.

To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies—all this is indispensably necessary. Even

Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible. You will never have anything to sustain you except the idea.

Twenty or twenty-five years ago, contraception and enlightenment were held to be almost synonymous.

At the sight of the words I love you the desire to stay alive had welled up in him