The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.

I grew up in an atmosphere tinged with militarism, and afterwards I spent five boring years within the sound of bugles. To this day it gives me a faint feeling of sacrilege not to stand to attention during ‘God save the King’. That is childish, of course, but I would sooner have had that kind...

Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.

At first they pretended to laugh to scorn the idea of animals managing a farm for themselves. The whole thing would be over in a fortnight, they said. They put it about that the animals on the Manor Farm (they insisted on calling it the Manor Farm; they would not tolerate the name “Animal Farm”)...

Le désir était un crime de la pensée.

Le Parti pouvait mettre à nu les plus petits détails de tout ce que l’on avait dit ou pensé, mais les profondeurs de votre cœur, dont les mouvements étaient mystérieux, même pour vous, demeuraient inviolables.

If she herself had had any picture of the future, it had been of a society of animals set free from hunger and the whip, all equal, each working according to his capacity, the strong protecting the weak, as she had protected the lost brood of ducklings with her foreleg on the night of Major’s...

Four legs good, two legs bad.

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

It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones

To begin with, there is the frightful debauchery of taste that has already been effected by a century of mechanisation. This is almost too obvious and too generally admitted to need pointing out. But as a single instance, take taste in its narrowest sense – the taste for decent food. In the highly mechanical countries,...

It is Sunday afternoon, preferably before the war. The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk. You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast...

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

The tank, the submarine, the torpedo, the machine-gun, even the rifle and the hand grenade are still in use.

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

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.

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

Dovunque, in tutto il mondo, centinaia o migliaia di milioni di individui, tutti eguali, ignari dell’esistenza di altri individui, tenuti separati da mura di odio e di bugie, eppure quasi gli stessi.

Do you know why you’re here? Shall I tell you why we brought you here? To cure you.To make you sane.

TWO AND TWO MAKES FIVE

I am a degenerate modern semi-intellectual who would die if I did not get my early morning cup of tea and my New Statesman every Friday. Clearly I do not, in a sense, ‘want’ to return to a simpler, harder, probably agricultural way of life. In the same sense I don’t ‘want’ to cut down...

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.

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.

The train bore me away, through the monstrous scenery of slag-heaps, chimneys, piled scrap-iron, foul canals, paths of cindery mud criss-crossed by the prints of clogs. This was March, but the weather had been horribly cold and everywhere there were mounds of blackened snow. As we moved slowly through the outskirts of the town we...

Would it not be better if they spent more money on wholesome things like oranges and wholemeal bread or if they even, like the writer of the letter to the New Statesman, saved on fuel and ate their carrots raw? Yes, it would, but the point is that no ordinary human being is ever going...

For the rest, she grew used to the life that she was leading – used to the enormous sleepless nights, the cold, the dirt, the boredom, and the horrible communism of the Square. After a day or two she had ceased to feel even a flicker of surprise at her situation. She had come, like...

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost...

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always...

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.”[Freedom of the Park, Tribune, 7 December 1945]

To die hating them, that was freedom.

a Novilíngua diferia da maior parte das outras línguas porque o seu vocabulário ia diminuindo em vez de aumentar todos os anos. Cada redução era um ganho, pois quanto menor a área de escolha, menor a tentação de pensar. Como fim último, esperava-se atingir uma linguagem emitida pela laringe, sem passar pelos centros nervosos superiores....

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.

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?…But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated…’Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan,’controls the future:who...

The whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish day-dream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.

Power is not a means; it is an end.

Nothing exists except through human consciousness

You are rotting away, you are falling to pieces. What are you? A bag of filth. Now turn around and look into that mirror again. Do you see that thing facing you? That is the last man. If you are human, that is humanity. Now put your clothes on again.

The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, indeed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration...

I suppose there hasn’t been a single month since the war, in any trade you care to name, in which there weren’t more men than jobs. It’s brought a peculiar, ghastly feeling into life. It’s like on a sinking ship when there are nineteen survivors and fourteen lifebelts. But is there anything particularly modern in...

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.

What now strikes as remarkable about the new moneyed class of the nineteenth century is their complete irresponsibility;they see everything in terms of individual success, with hardly any consciousness that the community exists.

At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation.

For if in careless summer daysIn groves of Ashtaroth we whored,Repentant now, when winds blow cold,We kneel before our rightful lord;The lord of all, the money-god,Who rules us blood and hand and brain,Who gives the roof that stops the wind,And, giving, takes away again;Who spies with jealous, watchful care,Our thoughts, our dreams, our secret ways,Who...

Has it ever occurred to you,’ he said, ‘that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?

I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.