George Orwell Quotes
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislikes him.
Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache.... Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.
No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.... Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever...
Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain.
To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.
What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.
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.
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.
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
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 neither resist nor understand.
Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
As time goes on and the horrors pile up, the mind seems to secrete a sort of self-protecting ignorance which needs a harder and harder shock to pierce it, just as the body will become immunised to a drug and require bigger and bigger doses.
Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery.
Ellis, was one of those people who constantly nag others to echo their own opinions.
If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one. This does not always happen, but it is to be expected, and you ought not to complain if it does happen.
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 will make it clearer?
4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.
The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
Is there anything in the world more graceless, more dishonouring, than to desire a woman whom you will never have?
Fate seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes.
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 all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children. I think it could be plausibly argued that changes of diet are more important than changes of dynasty or even of religion....Yet it is curious how seldom the all-importance of food is recognized. You see statues everywhere to politicians, poets, bishops, but none to cooks or bacon-curers or market gardeners.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
Orthodoxy means not thinking - not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
“You are a slow learner, Winston."
"How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four."
"Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
It struck him that in moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy, but always against one’s own body... On the battlefield, in the torture chamber, on a sinking ship, the issues that you are fighting for are always forgotten, because the body swells up until it fills the universe, and even when you are not paralysed by fright or screaming with pain, life is a moment-to-moment struggle against hunger or cold or sleeplessness, against a sour stomach or an aching tooth.
This is the inevitable fate of the sentimentalist. All his opinions change into their opposites at the first brush of reality.
There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
Your resolution must never falter. No argument must lead you astray. Never listen when they tell you that Man and the animals have a common interest....we must not come to resemble him...No animal must ever live in a house or sleep in a bed, or wear clothes, or drink alcohol, or smoke tobacco, or touch money, or engage in trade.
It is so with all types of manual work; it keeps us alive, and we are oblivious of its existence.
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 unimaginable.
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
A thousand influences constantly press a working man down into a passive role. He does not act, he is acted upon. He feels himself the slave of mysterious authority and has a firm conviction that 'they' will never allow him to do this, that, and the other.
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live—did live, from habit that became instinct—in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Between life and death, and between physical pleasure and physical pain, there is still a distinction, but that is all.
Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does.
If you have no money, men won't care for you, women won't love you; won't, that is, care for you or love you the last little bit that matters.
The world is a raft sailing through space with, potentially, plenty of provisions for everybody; the idea that we must all cooperate and see to it that everyone does his fair share of the work and gets his fair share of the provisions seems so blatantly obvious that one would say that no one could possibly fail to accept it unless he had some corrupt motive for clinging to the present system.
Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.
The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.
England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
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.
There were times when the fact of impending death seemed as palpable as the bed they lay on, and they would cling together with a sort of despairing sensuality, like a damned soul grasping at his last morsel of pleasure when the clock is within five minutes of striking.
For a creative writer possession of the "truth" is less important than emotional sincerity.
From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
I'm fat, but I'm thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there's thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there's a statue inside every block of stone?
Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
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.
In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
In past ages, a war, almost by definition, was something that sooner or later came to an end, usually in unmistakable victory or defeat. In the past, also, war was one of the main instruments by which human societies were kept in touch with physical reality. All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers, but they could not afford to encourage any illusion that tended to impair military efficiency. So long as defeat meant the loss of independence, or some other result generally held to be undesirable, the precautions against defeat had to be serious. Physical facts could not be ignored. In philosophy, or religion, or ethics, or politics, two and two might make five, but when one was designing a gun or an aeroplane they had to make four. Inefficient nations were always conquered sooner or later, and the struggle for efficiency was inimical to illusions. Moreover, to be efficient it was necessary to be able to learn from the past, which meant having a fairly accurate idea of what had happened in the past. Newspapers and history books were, of course, always coloured and biased, but falsification of the kind that is practiced today would have been impossible. War was a sure safeguard of sanity, and so far as the ruling classes were concerned it was probably the most important of all safeguards. While wars could be won or lost, no ruling class could be completely irresponsible.
I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put it off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.
As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull..
If there is a wrong thing to do, it will be done, infallibly. One has come to believe in that as if it were a law of nature.
A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer.
A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.
It is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior.
Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.
Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn't do the hangman's job.
At fifty, everyone has the face he deserves.
Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.
You will have to get used to living without results and without hope. You will work for a while, you will be caught, you will confess, and then you will die.
Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished forever.
All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers.
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.
He is as antisocial as a flea. Clearly, such people are undesirable, and a society in which they can flourish has something wrong with it.
Never listen when they tell you that Man and the animals have a common interest, that the prosperity of the one is the prosperity of the others. It is all lies. Man serves the interests of no creature except himself. And among us animals let there be perfect unity, perfect comradeship in the struggle. All men are enemies. All animals are comrades.
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals.
The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
"Do you believe in God, Winston?"
"No."
"Then what is it, this principle that will defeat us?"
"I don't know. The spirit of Man."
"And do you consider yourself a man?"
"Yes."
Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power. What pure power means you will understand presently. We are different from the oligarchies of the past in that we know what we are doing. All the others, even those who resembled ourselves, were cowards and hypocrites. The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives. They pretended, perhaps they even believed, that they had seized power unwillingly and for a limited time, and that just around the corner there lay a paradise where human beings would be free and equal. We are not like that. We know what no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. 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 is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now you begin to understand me.
Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.
But the thing that I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit.
We control life, Winston, at all its levels. You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature.
But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
All animals are equal but some are more equal than others.
