Quotes from George Orwell

I have no wish to take life, not even human life

We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive.

Those who abjure violence can only do so by others committing violence on their behalf.

The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.

In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolucionary act.

It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.

We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now.

And remember also that in fighting against man we must not come to resemble him. Even when you have conquered him, do not adopt his vices.

At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.

In moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one's own body.

Liberal: a power worshipper without power.

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?

In the past the need for a hierarchal form of society has been the doctrine specifically of the High. It had been preached by kings and aristocrats and the priests, lawyers and the like who were parasitical upon them, and it had generally been softened by promises of an imaginary world beyond the grave.

Everything faded into mist. The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became truth.

In practice nobody cares if work is useful or useless, productive or parasitic; the sole thing demanded is that it shall be profitable. In all the modern talk about energy, efficiency, social service and the rest of it, what meaning is there except Get money, get it legally, and get a lot of it? Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised.

TRUTH – It's the New Hate Speech: "During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act" – George Orwell

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 is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.' 'Why not?' 'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.

Some hams hanging in the kitchen were taken out for burial

and to know that things never had been, nor ever could be much better or much worse–hunger, hardship, and disappointment being, so he said, the unalterable law of life.

The aim of the joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.

How could you communicate with the future? It was of its nature impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him; or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.

Here you come upon the important fact that every revolutionary opinion draws part of its strength from a secret conviction that nothing can be changed.