George Orwell

“Parti'nin ulaşmaya çalıştığı ülkü, pırıl pırıl, korkunç, kocaman bir şeydi: dehşet saçan silahlar, korkunç makinelerle kurulmuş bir çelik ve beton dünyası ve hepsi tam bir birliktelik içinde ilerleyen, aynı şeyleri düşünen, aynı sloganları atan, hiç durmaksızın çalışan, savaşan, yenen, zulmeden, aynı yüzü taşıyan tam üç yüz milyon insan. Oysa gerçek, karnı doyurulmamış bir yığın insanın altı delik ayakkabılarıyla dolaşıp lahana ve çiş kokan, döküntü halindeki on dokuzuncu yüzyıl yapılarında oturduğu soluk, çürüyen kentlerdi.”

“To dislike a writer’s politics is one thing. To dislike him because he forces you to think is another, not necessarily incompatible with the first.”

“Any writer or journalist who wants to retain his integrity finds himself thwarted by the general drift of society rather than by active persecution. The sort of things that are working against him are the concentration of the press in the hands of a few rich men, the grip of monopoly on radio and the films, the unwillingness of the public to spend money on books, making it necessary for nearly every writer to earn part of his living by hackwork… Everything in our age conspires to turn the writer, and every other kind of artist as well, into a minor official, working on themes handed down from above and never telling what seems to him the whole of the truth. But in struggling against this fate he gets no help from his own side: that is, there is no large body of opinion which will assure him that he’s in the right.”

“We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.”

“Be more gay, I beseech you!”

“Bir sonu olmayan ve kimsenin okumayacağı, ama birisi için yazılmış ve bununla biçimlenen bir mektup gibiydi günlük.”

“I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY”

“This is the inevitable fate of the sentimentalist. All his opinions change into their opposites at the first brush of reality.”

“Oye, cuantos más hombres hayas tenido más te quiero yo. ¿Lo comprendes?”

“For when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs all of the others ... the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have the less you worry.When you have a hundred francs in the world you are liable to the most craven panics. When you have three francs left, you are quite indifferent ... you are bored but you are not afraid. You think vaguely "I shall be starving in a day or two- shocking, isn't it?" And then the mind wanders to other topics. A bread and margarine diet does, to some extent, provide its own anodyne.”

“Viņš bija aizmirsis, ka vairums ļaužu svešā zemē jūtas labi tikai tad, ja var noniecināt tās iedzīvotājus.”

“Tanrı bana sinekleri kovayım diye bir kuyruk vermiş; ama keşke sinekler de olmasaydı, kuyruğum da.”

“But it was frightening: or, more exactly, it was like a foretaste of death, like being a little less alive.”

“I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan”

“It was curious how that predestined horror moved in and out of one’s consciousness. There it lay, fixed in future times, preceding death as surely as 99 precedes 100. One could not avoid it, but one could perhaps postpone it: and yet instead, every now and again, by a conscious, wilful act, one chose to shorten the interval before it happened.”

“In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except "Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it"? Money has become the grand test of virtue.”

“The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a physical necessity.”

“Upravujeme jazyk do konečné podoby, jakou bude mít, až už nikdo jinak mluvit nebude. Až skončíme, budou se to lidé jako ty muset celé znovu učit. Ty si asi myslíš, že naše hlavní práce spočívá ve vymýšlení nových slov. Vůbec ne. My slova ničíme - moře slov, stovky denně. Otesáváme jazyk až na kost. Jedenácté vydání nebude obsahovat ani jediné slovo, které by mohlo do roku 2050 zastarat.”

“His mother’s death, nearly thirty years ago, had been tragic and sorrowful in a way that was no longer possible. Tragedy, he perceived, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there was still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason. His mother’s memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return, and because somehow, he did not remember how, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable. Such things, he saw, could not happen today. Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows. All this he seemed to see in the large eyes of his mother and his sister, looking up at him through the green water, hundreds of fathoms down and still sinking.”

“As he looked at the woman in her characteristic attitude, her thick arms reaching up for the line, her powerful mare-like buttocks protruded, it struck him for the first time that she was beautiful. It had never before occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work till it was coarse in the grain like an over-ripe turnip, could be beautiful. But it was so, and after all, he thought, why not? The solid, contourless body, like a block of granite, and the rasping red skin, bore the same relation to the body of a girl as the rose-hip to the rose. Why should the fruit be held inferior to the flower?”

“And it is a great thing to die in your own bed, though it is better still to die in your boots.”

“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?”

“The truth, it is felt, becomes untruth when your enemy utters it.”

“There are people that are convinced of the wickedness both of armies and of police forces, but who are nevertheless much more intolerant and inquisitorial in outlook than the normal person who believes that it is necessary to use your violence in certain circumstances.”

“Si quieres hacerte una idea de cómo será el futuro, figúrate una bota aplastando un rostro humano... incesantemente.”

“Na bojnom polju, u mučilištu, na brodu koji tone, razlozi zbog kojih se boriš uvijek se zaborave jer se tijelo nadimlje sve dok ne ispuni cijeli tvoj svemir, pa čak i onda kad te nije paralizirao strah ili ne vrištiš od boli, život je od trenutka do trenutka, samo borba protiv gladi ili hladnoće ili sna, protiv pokvarena želuca ili zuba koji boli.”

“I was said of these bombs (referring to FAI bombs) that they were 'impartial'; they killed then man they were thrown at and the man who threw them.”

“...This was not illegal, (nothing was illegal since there were no longer laws), but if detected it was reasonably certain that it would be punished by death...”

“She's beautiful,' he murmured.'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia.'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston.”

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

“The average citizen of Oceania never sets eyes on a citizen of either Eurasia or Eastasia, and he is forbidden the knowledge of foreign languages. If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies”

“It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true, that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during "God Save the King" than stealing from a poor box”

“...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.”

“In theory at any rate each militia was a democracy and not a hierarchy . It was understood that orders had to be obeyed, but it was also understood that when you gave an order you gave it as comrade to comrade and not as superior to inferior. There were officers and NCOs, but there was no military rank in the ordinary sense; not titles, no badges, no heel-clicking and saluting. They had attempted to produce within the militias a sort of temporary working model of the classless society.”

“Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.”

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

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

“The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.”

“A totalitarian society which succeeded in perpetuating itself would probably set us a schizophrenic system of thought, in which the laws of common sense held good in everyday life and in certain exact sciences, but could be disregarded by the politician, the historian, and the sociologist. Already there are countless people who would think it scandalous to falsify a scientific text-book, but would see nothing wrong in falsifying an historical fact.”

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

“Tell me, what did you think of me before that day I gave you that note?”He did not feel any temptation to tell lies to her. It was even a sort of love-offering to start off by telling the worst.“I hated the sight of you,” he said. “I wanted to rape you and then murder you afterwards. Two weeks ago I thought seriously of smashing your head in with a cobble-stone.”

“İnsan sevilmekten çok anlaşılmayı istiyordu belki de.”

“* *Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for.*Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.”

“He had moved from thought to words, and now from words to actions.”

“After knowing him I saw the force of the proverb ‘Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek, but don’t trust an Armenian.”

“Dodici voci si alzarono furiose, e tutte erano simili. Non c'era da chiedersi ora che cosa fosse successo al viso dei maiali. Le creature di fuori guardavano dal maiale all'uomo, dall'uomo al maiale e ancora dal maiale all'uomo, ma già era loro impossibile distinguere fra i due.”

“Thoughtcrime, they called it.”

“As soon as he touched her she seemed to wince and stiffen. To embrace her was like embracing a jointed wooden image. And what was strange was that even when she was clasping him against her he had the feeling that she was simultaneously pushing him away with all her strength.”

“I never thought I should live to grow blasé about the sound of gunfire, but so I have”

“I dreamt-' he began, and stopped short. It was too complex to be put into words. There was the dream itself, and there was a memory connected with it that had swum into his mind in the few seconds after waking.”