George Orwell
During five literary generations every enlightened person had despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there.Collection: Art
Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one. At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the Earth goes round the Sun; today, to believe the past is inalterable. He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, then a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.Collection: Believe
International football is the continuation of war by other means.Collection: Soccer
In places this book is a little over-written, because Mr Blunden is no more able to resist a quotation than some people are to refuse a drink.Collection: Book
[Political] prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.Collection: Political Language
Cricket is a game full or forlorn hopes and sudden dramatic changes of fortune and its rules are so ill-defined that their interpretation is partly an ethical business.Collection: Business
How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?Collection: Pieces
... ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance... A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon -- so long as there is no answer to it -- gives claws to the weak.Collection: Strong
I would sooner be a foreigner in Spain than in most countries. How easy it is to make friends in Spain!Collection: Country
The food crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in the hopes of adding five years onto the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.Collection: Cutting
To do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife.Collection: Solitude
The major problem of our time is the decay in the belief in personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with while the average human being is either drudging like an ox or shivering in fear of the secret police... How right [the working classes] are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time!Collection: Average
If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man.Collection: Men
He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginableCollection: Past
Bombing is not especially inhumane. War itself is inhumane and the bombing plane, which is used to paralyse industry and transport, is a relatively civilised weapon. 'Normal' or 'legitimate' warfare is just as destructive of inanimate objects and enormously so of human lives.Collection: War
If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.Collection: Thinking
There were sins that were too subtle to be explained, and there were others that were too terrible to be clearly mentioned. For example, there was sex, which was always smouldering just under the surface and which suddenly blew up into a tremendous row when I was about twelve.Collection: Sex
He wondered vaguely whether in the abolished past it had been a normal experience to lie in bed like this, in the cool of a summer evening, a man and a woman with no clothes on, making love when they chose, talking of what they chose, not feeling any compulsion to get up, simply lying there and listening to peaceful sounds outside. Surely there could never have been a time when that seemed ordinary?Collection: Summer
I think I exist,' he said wearily. 'I am conscious of my own identity. I was born, and I shall die. I have arms and legs. I occupy a particular point in space. No other solid object can occupy the same point simultaneously.Collection: Thinking
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 is no knowing. It might be a thousand years. At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation. In the face of the Thought Police there is no other way.Collection: Dust
Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me--Collection: Tree
It was not the man's brain that was speaking; it was his larynx.Collection: Men
We may be together for another six months—a year—there’s no knowing. At the end we’re certain to be apart. Do you realize how utterly alone we shall be?Collection: Years
Writing a novel is agony.Collection: Writing
Do you remember writing in your diary," he said, "that it did not matter whether I was a friend or an enemy, since I was at least a person who understood you and could be talked to? You were right. I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.Collection: Writing
By revolution we become more ourselves, not less.Collection: Revolution
You asked me once,' said O'Brien, 'what was in Room 101. I told you that you knew the answer already. Everyone knows it. The thing that is in Room 101 is the worst thing in the world.Collection: Answers
Winston Churchill could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war.Collection: Country
The object of powder is powder.Collection: Powder
Pessimism is reactionary because it makes the very idea of improving the world impossible.Collection: Ideas
Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place.Collection: Book
The cat joined the Re-education Committee and was very active in it for some days. She was seen one dag sitting on a roof and talking to some sparrows who were just out of her reach. She was telling them that all animals were now comrades and that any sparrow who chose could come and perch on her paw; but the sparrows kept their distance.Collection: Distance
In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards.Collection: Art
There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word-- ManCollection: Men
The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life.Collection: Children
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, except that you happen to be the same person.Collection: Mother
The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.Collection: Coming Back
[...] you can get anything in this world if you genuinely don't want it.Collection: World
Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly.Collection: Said Life
Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist.Collection: War
The men who were well enough to stand had moved across the carriage to cheer the Italians as they went past. A crutch waved out of the window; bandaged forearms made the Red Salute. It was like an allegorical picture of war; the trainload of fresh men gliding proudly up the line, the maimed men sliding slowly down, and all the while the guns on the open trucks making one's heart leap as guns always do, and reviving that pernicious feeling, so difficult to get rid of, that war *is* glorious after all.Collection: Cheer
What happens to you here is forever.Collection: Forever
I have tipped waiters, and I have been tipped by waiters.Collection: Waiter
In moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one's own body.Collection: Fighting
To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.Collection: Mean
Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.Collection: Reality
Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.Collection: People
Pacifism is objectively pro-FascistCollection: Inspirational
It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself-anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face ... was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime.Collection: Expression