Quotes from George Orwell

You are a slow learner, Winston. How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four. Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?

Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.

Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.

The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.

No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.

There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.

If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.

Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me: There lie they, and here lie we Under the spreading chestnut tree.

Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.

Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist? O'Brien: Of course he exists. Winston Smith: Does he exist like you or me? O'Brien: You do not exist.

There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.

He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

Let's face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.

In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four.