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...

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...

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...

The past is a curious thing. It’s with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the...

That the Party did not seek power for its own ends, but only for the good of the majority. That it sought power because men in the mass were frail cowardly creatures who could not...

The woman at the desk was a university graduate, young, colourless, spectacled, and intensely disagreeable. She had a fixed suspicion that no one — at least, no male person — ever consulted works of reference...

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

İktidar bir araç değil, bir amaçtır. Kimse devrimi korumak için diktatörlük kurmaz; diktatörlük kurmak için devrim yapar. Zulmün amacı zulümdür. İşkencenin amacı işkencedir. İktidarın amacı iktidardır.

In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards.

…In this place you could not feel anything, except pain and foreknowledge of pain.

[T]he imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.

I have not betrayed Julia.

From … the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. … I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that...

I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and...

Be more gay, I beseech you!

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom...

Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside...

The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.

They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value...

We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there...

Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.