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.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in...

To die hating them, that was freedom.

Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them...

Is a PLONGEUR’S work really necessary to civilization? We have a feeling that it must be ‘honest’ work, because it is hard and disagreeable, and we have made a sort of fetish of manual work....

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...

Nimic nu există în altă parte dec t în conștiința omului.

Le désir était un crime de la pensée.

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...

Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn’t matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.

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...

If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any result whatever, you’ve beaten them.

When I was young and had no senseIn far-off MandalayI lost my heart to a Burmese girlAs lovely as the day.Her skin was gold, her hair was jet,her teeth were ivory;I said, “For twenty silver...

The mistake you make, don’t you see,is in thinking one can live in a corrupt society without being corrupt oneself. After all, what do you achieve by refusing to make money? You’re trying to behave...

The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.

People are wrong when they think that an unemployed man only worries about losing his wages; on the contrary, an illiterate man, with the work habit in his bones, needs work even more than he...

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...

Vicisti, O Aspidistra!

He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.

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...

No domínio da vida quotidiana afigurava-se, sem dúvida, necessário, pelo menos às vezes, reflectir antes de falar, mas um membro do Partido chamado a emitir um juízo político ou ético devia ser capaz de disparar...

England is not the jewelled isle of Shakespeare’s muchd message, nor is it the inferno depicted by Dr Goebbels. More than either it resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black...

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...

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

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

Why should be fruit be held inferior to the flower?

The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency.

Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.

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

Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.

Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold.

Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your...

I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet

When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys.

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date.

It is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

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

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...

Suddenly, by the sort of violent effort with which one wrenches one’s head away from the pillow in a nightmare, Winston succeeded in transferring his hatred from the face on the screen to the dark−haired...

Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.

Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thought-crime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express...

It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.

If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love. when the last of the chocolate was gone, his mother had clasped the child in...

Page after page, advert after advert. Lipsticks, undies, tinned food, patent medicines, slimming cures, face-creams. A sort of cross-section of the money world. A panorama of ignorance, greed, vulgarity, snobbishness, whoredom and disease.

All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.

Spring, spring! Bytuene Mershe ant Averil, when spray biginneth to spring! When shaws be sheene and swards full fayre, and leaves both large and longe! When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces, in...

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...

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.