Quotes from George Orwell

I am not saying, of course, that most tramps are ideal characters; I am only saying that they are ordinary human beings, and that if they are worse than other people it is the result and not the cause of their way of life.

Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?

And in all of us there is at least a tinge of that habit of mind. In every country in the world the large army of scientists and technicians, with the rest of us panting at their heels, is marching along the road of 'progress' with the blind persistence of a column of ants.

Everything's streamlined nowadays, even the bullet Hitler's keeping for you.

You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinised.

When nationalism first became a religion, the English looked at the map, and, noticing that their island lay very high in the Northern Hemisphere, evolved the pleasing theory that the further north you live the more virtuous you become. The histories I was given when I was a little boy started off by explaining in the naïvest way that a cold climate made people energetic while a hot one made them lazy, and hence the defeat of the Spanish Armada.

The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever. VII

In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolise the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates.

She had become a physical necessity, something that he not only wanted but felt he had the right to

you do not escape from money by being moneyless. On the contrary, you are the hopeless slave of money until you have enough of it to live on

Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been determined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?' No

there is always a temptation to think that industrialism is harmless so long as it is clean and orderly.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been re-painted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

There was a direct, intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy.

In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.

The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture, and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation.

Each day they expend innumerable foot-pounds of energy—enough to plough thousands of acres, build miles of road, put up dozens of houses—in mere, useless walking.

We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.

He really didn't want his job. He didn't want to work again; all he wanted was to sink, sink, effortless, down into the mud.

I was at the barracks about a week. Chiefly I remember the horsy smells, the quavering bugle-calls (all our buglers were amateurs—I first learned the Spanish bugle-calls by listening to them outside the Fascist lines), the tramp-tramp of hobnailed boots in the barrack yard, the long morning parades in the wintry sunshine, the wild games of football, fifty a side, in the gravelled riding-school.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever. The moral to be drawn from this dangerous nightmare situation is a simple one: don't let it happen. It depends on you.

The Party was trying to kill the sex instinct, or, if it could not be killed, then to distort it and dirty it.

He had still, he reflected, not learned the ultimate secret. He understood how; he did not understand why.

He was the tormentor, he was the protector, he was the inquisitor, he was the friend