Quotes by George Orwell (Page 3 of 4)

We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future.

I managed to get my copy of Ulysses through safely this time. I rather wish I had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production.

It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought...should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.

He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.

If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable -- what then?

Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges.

I noticed how the attitude of women varies with a man's clothes. When a badly dressed man passes them they shudder away from him with a quite frank movement of disgust, as though he were a dead cat. Clothes are very powerful things.

The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction.

A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses.

Donkeys live a long time. None of you has ever seen a dead donkey.

Writing a novel is agony.

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.

The dead men had become martyrs and their degradation was forgotten.

Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold.

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date.

You do not exist.
I think I exist. I am conscious of my own identity. I was born, and I shall die. I have arms and legs. I occupy a particular point in space. No other solid object can occupy the same point simultaneously.

In this place you could not feel anything, except pain and the foreknowledge of pain.

What mattered was that the room over the junk-shop should exist. To know that it was there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it. The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.

But when war becomes literally continuous , it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded.

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means; it is an end.

The stuff that was coming out of his mouth consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.

It was only a hopeless fantasy,
it passed like an April day,
but a look and a word and the dreams they stirred
they have stolen my heart away.

Then the face of Big Brother faded away again and instead the three slogans of the Party stood out in bold capitals:  
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

They say that time heals all things,
they say you can always forget;
but the smiles and the tears across the years
they twist my heart strings yet!

I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.
(in The Sporting Spirit, Tribune, GB, London, December 1945).

The horrible thing about the Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but that it was impossible to avoid joining in.

It reminded us that propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has a meaning and a purpose -- a political, social and religious purpose -- that our aesthetic judgements are always coloured by our prejudices and beliefs.

Winston was gelatinous with fatigue.

And remember, comrades, your resolution must never falter. No argument must lead you astray.

A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up the details.

Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power.

The cost of reading, even if you buy books instead of borrowing them and take in a fairly large number of periodicals, does not amount to more than the combined cost of smoking and drinking.

All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes.

There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all.

No animal shall kill any other animal without cause.

I understand HOW. I do not understand WHY.

The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.

To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.

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

Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia's life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.

Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99 percent of the population exist.

If you have no money, men won't care for you, women won't love you; won't, that is, care for you or love you the last little bit that matters.

If there is any hope, it lies in the proles.

The point is that the pleasures of spring are available to everybody, and cost nothing.

Freedom of speech and of the Press are usually attacked by arguments which are not worth bothering about.

Perhaps the Party was rotten under the surface, its cult of strenuousness and self-denial simply a sham concealing iniquity.

Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me.

All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.

In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.

My best fishing-memory is about some fish that I never caught.

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

But it was alright, everything was alright, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

Surely, comrades, you don't want Jones back?

Some hams hanging in the kitchen were taken out for burial.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

No one I met at this time -- doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients -- failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.

Yet in the most mean, cowardly, hypocritical way the British ruling class did all they could to hand Spain over to Franco and the Nazis. Why? Because they were pro-Fascist, was the obvious answer.

Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles.

It is a curious sensation, being a customer where you have been a slave's slave.

It appeared that even in Barcelona there were hardly any bullfights nowadays; for some reason all the best matadors were Fascists.

For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable -- what then?

The plant is blind but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will continue to do this in the face of endless discouragements.

The command of the old despotisms was Thou shalt not. The command of the totalitarians was Thou shalt. Our command is Thou art.

Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope.

If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened--that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.

And to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse -- hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.

Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers.

The distinguishing mark of man is the hand, the instrument with which he does all his mischief.

It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda tours.

But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.

Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

To die hating them, that was freedom.

Power is not a means; it is an end.

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?

The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background.

He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.

Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.

In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.

They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself.

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

Day is over, night has come. Today is gone, what's done is done. Embrace your dreams, through the night. Tomorrow comes with a whole new light.

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those that speak it.

One feels of him that there was much he did not understand, but not that there was anything that he was frightened of saying or thinking.

On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

Many people genuinely do not want to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.

Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.

One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

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

Four legs good, two legs bad.

The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.

Serious sport is war minus the shooting.

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

Big Brother is watching you.

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.