Despotic governments can stand ‘moral force’ till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.

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.

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....

We are the dead,’ he said.’We are the dead,’ echoed Julia dutifully.’You are the dead,’ said an iron voice behind them.

Enquanto eles não se conscientizarem, não serão rebeldes autênticos e, enquanto não se rebelarem, não têm como se conscientizarem.

Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: ‘It doesn’t really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.’ He pushed the thought under instantly. The...

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...

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.

The sensitive person’s hostility to the machine is in one sense unrealistic, because of the obvious fact that the machine has come to stay. But as an attitude of mind there is a great deal...

The Spaniards are good at many things, but not at making war. All foreigners are alike appalled by their inefficiency, above all their maddening unpunctuality. The one word that no foreigner can avoid learning is...

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

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits....

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness....

A not-too-distant explosion shakes the house, the windows rattle in their sockets, and in the next room the class of 1964 wakes up and lets out a yell or two. Each time this happens I...

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...

Power is not a means; it is an end.

Poverty is spiritual halitosis.

The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of...

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

Progress is not an illusion; it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

If one harbors anywhere in one’s mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, though in a sense known to be true, are inadmissable.

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

What he realised, and more clearly as time went on, was that money-worship has been elevated into a religion. Perhaps it is the only real religion-the only felt religion-that is left to us. Money is...

Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constituitionalism and legality, the belief in ‘the law’ as something above the state and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of...

After the sorts of winters we have had to endure recently, the spring does seem miraculous, because it has become gradually harder and harder to believe that it is actually going to happen. Every February...

I want to give just a slight indication of the influence the book has had. I knew that George Orwell, in his second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter, published in 1935, had borrowed from Joyce for...

Is it not crystal clear, then, comrades, that all the evils of this life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings?

Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.

* *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...

TWO AND TWO MAKES FIVE

…every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures.

And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender to them.

I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back...

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

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.

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

Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something you had aright to.

No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions,...

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.

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

What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing,...

For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life trying to impress the ‘natives,’ and so in every crisis he has got to do what the ‘natives’ expect of him…...

A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into; the other functions and faculties may be more godlike, but in point of time they come afterwards. A man dies and is buried, and...

had been equally obvious. The new aristocracy was made up for the most part of bureaucrats, scientists, technicians, trade-union organisers, publicity experts, sociologists, teachers, journalists and professional politicians. These people, whose origins

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...

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

A writer inevitably – and less directly this applies to all the arts – about contemporary events, and his impulse is to tell what he believes to be truth. But no government, no big organisation,...

Don’t you enjoy being alive? Don’t you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I’m real, I’m solid, I’m alive! Don’t you like this?