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.

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?

Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.

Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.

Inequality was the price of civilization.

…all the evils of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings.

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.

Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement. Pleasure in the impact of one sound on another, in the firmness of good prose...

Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxwork displays, film shows, telescreen programs all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can...

…for everyone there is something unendurable – something that cannot be contemplated. Courage and cowardice are not involved. If you are falling from a height it is not cowardly to clutch at a rope. If...

It reminded us that propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has a meaning and a purpose — a political, social and religious purpose — that our...

Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is possible that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never had much temptation to be human beings.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face–forever.

He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

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

Surely, comrades, you do not want Jones back?”Once again this argument was unanswerable. Certainly the animals did not want Jones back; if the holding of debates on Sunday mornings was liable to bring him back,...

England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.

In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did...