George Orwell

“They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.”

“Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

“In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. 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?”

“In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.”

“The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.”

“But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.”

“All saints should be judged guilty until proven innocent.”

“Todos los animales son iguales, pero algunos son más iguales que otros.”

“For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.”

“Quite likely he would be in the cellars of the Ministry of Love within three days, but a cigarette end must not be wasted.”

“I have no particular love for the idealized “worker” as he appears in the bourgeois Communist’s mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”

“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.”

“Friend of fatherless!Fountain of happiness!Lord of the swill-bucket! Oh, how my soul is onFire when I gaze at thyCalm and commanding eye.Like the sun in the sky,Comrade Napoleon!Thou are the giver ofAll thy creatures love,Full belly twice a day, clean straw to roll upon;Every beast great or small,Sleeps at peace in his stall,Thou watchest over all,Comrade Napoleon!Had I a sucking-pig,Ere he had grown as bigEven as a pint bottle or a a rolling-pinHe should have learned to beFaithful and true to thee,Yes, his first squeak should beComrade Napoleon!”

“[...] you can get anything in this world if you genuinely don't want it.”

“There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always— do not forget this, Winston— always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless.If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever. ”

“Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland,Beasts of every land and clime,Hearken to my joyful tidingsOf the golden future time.Soon or late the day is coming,Tyrant Man shall be o'erthrown,And the fruitful fields of EnglandShall be trod by beasts alone.Rings shall vanish from our noses,And the harness from our back,Bit and spur shall rust forever,Cruel whips shall no more crack.Riches more than mind can picture,Wheat and barley, oats and hay,Clover, beans, and mangel-wurzels,Shall be ours upon that day.Bright will shine the fields of England,Purer shall its water be,Sweeter yet shall blow its breezesOn the day that sets us free.For that day we all must labour,Though we die before it break;Cows and horses, geese and turkeys,All must toils for freedom's sake.Beasts of England, beasts of Ireland,Beasts of every land and clime,Hearken well and spread my tidingsOf the golden future time. ”

“Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. Never use a long word where a short one will do. If it is possible to cut a word out always cut it out. Never use the passive voice where you can use the active. Never use a foreign phrase a scientific word or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.”

“Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly.”

“Winston was gelatinous with fatigue.”

“the mute protest in your own bones”

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

“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.”

“His whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted with an unbearable sensitivity, a sort of transparency, which made every movement, every sound, every contact, every word that he had to speak or listen to, an agony. Even in sleep he could not altogether escape form her image.”

“Now, comrades, what is the nature of this life of ours? Let us face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.”

“Il réfléchit qu'il était déjà mort. Il lui apparut que c'était seulement lorsqu'il avait commencé à être capable de formuler ses idées qu'il avait fait le pas décisif. Les conséquences d'un acte sont incluses dans l'acte lui-même. Il écrivit : "Le crime de penser n'entraîne pas la mort. Le crime de penser est la mort.”

“Pacifism is a tenable position, provided that you are prepared to live with the consequences.”

“Hitherto, the rights and wrongs had seemed so beautifully simple.”

“Those who abjure violence can only do so by others committing violence on their behalf.”

“Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.”

“Literature, especially poetry, and lyric poetry most of all, is a kind of family joke, with little or no value outside its own language-group.”

“One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think, as I thought then, that it is better to die violently and not too old.”

“A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.”

“You could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred.”

“Libertad es poder decir libremente que dos y dos son cuatro. Si se concede esto, todo lo demás vendrá por sus pasos contados.”

“...the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.”

“لاقت الخنازير الثلاثة في بداية الأمر صعوبة بالغة في نشر دعوتها لما اعترضها من غباء الحيوانات الأخرى واستكانتها للأمر الواقع، حتى إن فيها من كان يرى ضرورة الإخلاص لجونز وأصرت على الإشارة له بلقب السيد! وكانت تحمد له صنيعه في إيوائها وإطعامها، وكانت تخشى عاقبة الخروج من طاعته، وكانت الحيوانات المستكينة لا تخجل من أن تجادل بأن الموت مكتوب عليها بطريقة ما، وبأنها إذا ماتت فإنها لا تأبه بما بعد الموت! وإذا ما ذكرت لها الخنازير الثلاثة أن الثورة آتية لا ريب، وأنها من الأمور الحتمية تساءلت: فعلام إذن الجهاد والتعب فيما هو آت بالضرورة واقع بالحتمية؟”

“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.”

“The human louse somewhat resembles a tiny lobster, and he lives chiefly in your trousers. Short of burning all your clothes there is no known way of getting rid of him. Down the seams of your trousers he lays his glittering white eggs, like tiny grains of rice, which hatch out and breed families of thier own at horrible speed. I think pacifists might find it helpful to illustrate thier pamphlets with enlarged photographs of lice. Glory of war indeed! In war all solderies are lousy, at the least when it is warm enough. The men that fought at Verdun, at Waterloo, at Flodden, at Senlac, at Thermopylae - every one of them had lice crawling over his testicles.”

“Within any important issue, there are always aspects no one wishes to discuss.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Under the spreading chestnut treeI sold you and you sold me--”

“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.”

“When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases -- bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder -- one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker's spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them. And this is not altogether fanciful. A speaker who uses that kind of phraseology has gone some distance toward turning himself into a machine. The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved as it would be if he were choosing his words for himself. If the speech he is making is one that he is accustomed to make over and over again, he may be almost unconscious of what he is saying, as one is when one utters the responses in church. And this reduced state of consciousness, if not indispensable, is at any rate favorable to political conformity.”

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

“That is her style of beauty.”

“All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

“It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier for a poet than a prose writer to feel at home in an authoritarian society.[...]what the poet is saying- that is, what his poem "means" if translated into prose- is relatively unimportant, even to himself. The thought contained in a poem is always simple, and is no more the primary purpose of the poem than the anecdote is the primary purpose of the picture. A poem is an arrangement of sounds and associations, as a painting is an arrangement of brushmarks. For short snatches, indeed, as in the refrain of a song, poetry can even dispense with meaning altogether.”

“How many a time have I stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who would stop me enjoying this if they could. But luckily they can't. So long as you are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a holiday camp, spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.”

“War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking into the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comforable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.”