George Orwell

“The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money frees people from work.”

“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.”

“A person of bourgeois origin goes through life with some expectation of getting what he wants, within reasonable limits. Hence the fact thjat in times of stress "educated" people tend to come to the front; they are no more gifted than the others and their "education" is generally quite useless in itself, but they are accustomed to a certain amount of deference and consequently have the cheek necessary to a commander.”

“Traditions are not killed by facts.”

“La double pensée est le pouvoir de garder à l'esprit simultanément deux croyances contradictoires, et de les accepter toutes deux.”

“Despotic governments can stand 'moral force' till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.”

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

“A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”

“it is a corrupting thing to live one's real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it.”

“For the future. For the unborn.”

“I tell you I can't be bothered with things like that. I've got a soul above buttons.”

“He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something that you had a right to. It was true that he had no memories of anything greatly different. In any time that he could accurately remember, there had never been quite enough to eat, one had never had socks or underclothes that were not full of holes, furniture had always been battered and rickety, rooms underheated, tube trains crowded, houses falling to pieces, bread dark-coloured, tea a rarity, coffee filthy-tasting, cigarettes insufficient -- nothing cheap and plentiful except synthetic gin. And though, of course, it grew worse as one's body aged, was it not a sign that this was not the natural order of things, if one's heart sickened at the discomfort and dirt and scarcity, the interminable winters, the stickiness of one's socks, the lifts that never worked, the cold water, the gritty soap, the cigarettes that came to pieces, the food with its strange evil tastes? Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had once been different?”

“What sickens me about left-wing people, especially the intellectuals, is their utter ignorance of the way things actually happen.”

“The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.”

“Il y a partout la même structure pyramidale, le même culte d'un chef semi-divin, le même système économique existant par et pour une guerre continuelle.”

“En résumé, une société hiérarchisée n'était possible que sur la base de la pauvreté et de l'ignorance.”

“Vous ne possédez rien, en dehors des quelques centimètres cubes de votre crâne.”

“Les meilleurs livres sont ceux qui racontent ce que l'on sait déjà.”

“You're dishonoured, somehow. You've sinned. Sinned against the aspidistra.""You talk a great deal about aspidistras," said Ravelston."They're a dashed important subject," said Gordon.”

“I think I exist,' he said wearily. '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.”

“You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Paty, which is collective and immortal.”

“They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare the utmost detail of everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.”

“If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man.”

“The first effect of poverty is that it kills thought.”

“Kochany, nie obchodzą mnie następne pokolenia! Mnie chodzi o nas dwoje!- Jesteś buntownikiem tylko od pasa w dół - stwierdził”

“Żyć nawet tak, z dniana dzień i z tygodnia na tydzień, wciąż w teraźniejszości i bez żadnych widoków naprzyszłość, nakazywał im instynkt równie niemożliwy do przezwyciężenia jak ten, którywprawia w ruch płuca, dopóki w powietrzu jest choć odrobina tlenu.”

“Sanity was statistical. It was merely a question of learning to think as they thought.”

“„Libertatea este sclavie””În realitate, nici n-o să mai existe gândire, în sensul în care o înțelegem noi acum. Ortodoxia înseamnă a nu gândi - a nu avea nevoie să gândești. Ortodoxia înseamnă lipsa conștiinței.”

“„Până nu devin comștienți, nu se vor răzvrăti și până nu se răzvrătesc, nu pot deveni conștienți” - 1984”

“İnsanın azınlıkta olması tek kişilik bir azınlık olması bile deli olduğu anlamına gelmiyordu bir doğru vardı bir de doğru olmayan doğruya sarıldığın zaman tüm dünyayı karşına bile alsan deli olmuyordun.”

“I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put if off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.”

“the strange thing is that when a word is well established as a swear word, it seems to lose its original meaning; that is, it loses the thing that made it into a swear word. A word becomes an oath because it means a certain thing, and, because it has become an oath, it ceases to mean that thing.”

“Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modem people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.”

“I said. ‘It seems to me that when you take a man’s money away he’s fit for nothing from that moment.’‘No, not necessarily. If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can still keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, ‘I’m a free man in HERE‘‘—he tapped his forehead—‘and you’re all right.”

“The stars are a free show; it don’t cost anything to use your eyes”

“Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.”

“Like the crocodile, he strikes always at the weakest spot.”

“The more men you've had, the more I love you.”

“At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas of which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is “not done” to say it… Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the high-brow periodicals.”

“únicamente el viejo Benjamín manifestaba recordar cada detalle de su larga vida y saber que las cosas nunca fueron, ni podrían ser, mucho mejor o mucho peor; el hambre, la opresión y el desengaño eran, así dijo él,la ley inalterable de la vida”

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

“We are not interested in those stupid crimes you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about. ”

“If there is hope, it lies in the proles.”

“Men are infinitely malleable.”

“In a way, the world−view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.”

“She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty years. At the end of it she was still singing.”

“Every Joke is a Tiny Revolution”

“Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear. It is based on the idea that there is some mysterious, fundamental difference between rich and poor, as though they were two different races, like Negroes and white men. But in reality there is no such difference. The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else, and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit. Change places, and handy dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief? Everyone who has mixed on equal terms with the poor knows this quite well. But the trouble is that intelligent, cultivated people, the very people who might be expected to have liberal opinions, never do mix with the poor. For what do the majority of educated people know about poverty?”

“The educated man pictures a horde of submen, wanting only a day's liberty to loot his house, burn his books, and set him to work minding a machine or sweeping out a lavatory. 'Anything,' he thinks, 'any injustice, sooner than let that mob loose.' He does not see that since there is no difference between the mass of rich and poor, there is no question of setting the mob loose. The mob is in fact loose now, and--in the shape of rich men--is using its power to set up enormous treadmills of boredom, such as 'smart' hotels.”

“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. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred, and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate. It is therefore realized on all sides that however ofter Persia, or Egypt, or Java, or Ceylon may change hands, the main frontiers must never be crossed by anything except bombs.”