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

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...

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.

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...

Sometimes they threaten you with something – something you can’t stand up to, can’t even think about. And then you say, “Don’t do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to So-and-so.”...

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.

It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste....

case” with deliberate suppression of his opponent’s point of view, and, what is more, with complete insensitiveness to any sufferings except those of himself and his friends.

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...

A thing which I regret, and which I will try to remedy some time, is that I have never in my life planted a walnut. Nobody does plant them nowadays—when you see a walnut it...

An earthquake is such fun when it is over.

This life we live nowadays. It’s not life, it’s stagnation death-in-life. Look at all these bloody houses and the meaningless people inside them. Sometimes I think we’re all corpses. Just rotting upright.

He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.

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...

La libertad es poder decir libremente que dos y dos son cuatro. Si se concede esto, todo lo demás vendrá por sus pasos contados.

Nothing exists except through human consciousness

Ce știm noi despre orișice, pe altă cale dec t cu ajutorul minții noastre? Totul se petrece, de fapt, în mintea noastră. Ceea ce se petrece în toate mințile în același timp – acela este...

With its grace and carelessness, it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though [all] could be swept into a nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm.

And yet hewas in the right! They were wrong and he was right. Theobvious, the silly, and the true had got to be defended. Truismsare true, hold on to that! The solid world exists, its...

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...

No one I met at this time — doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients– failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I...

Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution...

It is not certain whether the effects of totalitarianism upon verse need be so deadly as its effects on prose. There is a whole series of converging reasons why it is somewhat easier for a...

When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with...

Dora brought it. Ah, that’s better. That at least doesn’t fail.

He wondered about the people in houses like those. They would be, for example, small clerks, shop-assistants, commercial travellers, insurance touts, tram conductors. Did they know that they were only puppets dancing when money pulled...

Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child’s Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one...

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...

One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

All nationalistic distinctions – all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect – are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people...

So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.

Room 101,’ he said.

There was a direct intimate connection between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch,...

I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That’s an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it’s next door to impossible not to...

People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it.

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...