Quotes from George Orwell

Detesto lo que dices, pero defendería hasta la muerte tu derecho a decirlo".

If you look into your own mind, which are you, Don Quixote or Sancho Panza?" he had asked in the great essay on dirty postcards. "Almost certainly you are both. There is one part of you that wishes to be a hero or a saint, but another part of you is a little fat man who sees very clearly the advantages of staying alive with a whole skin. He is your unofficial self, the voice of the belly protesting against the soul.

If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality.

He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless,because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so ...

Quite likely he would be in the cellars of the Ministry of Love within three days, but a cigarette end must not be wasted.

But at any rate, one thing was certain. The conspiracy that he had dreamed of did exist, and he had reached the outer edges of it.

In this place, he knew instinctively, the lights would never be turned out. It was the place with no darkness.

Since that time, war had literally been continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war.

All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes — a fact which is recognized in the extra ration issued to old-age pensioners.

Quien controla el presente controla el pasado y quien controla el pasado controlará el futuro.

But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party.

What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect.

Lo más característico de la vida moderna no era su crueldad ni su inseguridad, sino sencillamente su vaciedad, su absoluta falta de contenido.

When a man has a black face, suspicion is proof.

And even technological progress only happens when its products can in some way be used for the diminution of human liberty.

I can see the war that's coming and I can see the after-war, the food-queues and the secret police and the loudspeakers telling you what to think.

O'Brien lo había torturado casi hasta enloquecerlo y era seguro que dentro de un rato le haría matar. Pero no importaba. En cierto sentido, más allá de la amistad, eran íntimos

Listen, the more men you've had, the more I love you. Do you understand that?" "Yes, perfectly." "I hate purity, I hate goodness. I don't want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones." "Well then, I ought to suit you, dear. I'm corrupt to the bones.

I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies—unless one counts journalists.

In reality there is no kind of evidence or argument by which one can show that Shakespeare, or any other writer, is good. Nor is there any way of definitely proving that--for instance--Warwick Beeping is bad. Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.

I dreamt-' he began, and stopped short. It was too complex to be put into words. There was the dream itself, and there was a memory connected with it that had swum into his mind in the few seconds after waking.

You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.

Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written record and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon. And since the Party is in full control of all records and in equally full control of the minds of its members, it follows that the past is whatever the Party chooses to make it.

Public opinion is less tolerant than any system of law.