Quotes from George Orwell

No case is really answered until it has had a fair hearing

All favourable Utopias seem to be alike in postulating perfection while being unable to suggest happiness.

Bisa dikatakan semakin mahal makanan, semakin banyak keringat dan ludah yang harus dimakan.

Goldstein was delivering his usual venomous attack upon the doctrines of the Party—an attack so exaggerated and perverse that a child should have been able to see through it, and yet just plausible enough to fill one with an alarmed feeling that other people, less level-headed than oneself, might be taken in by it.

The fat Russian agent was cornering all the foreign refugees in turn and explaining plausibly that this whole affair was an Anarchist plot. 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.

They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.

The English will never develop into a nation of philosophers. They will always prefer instinct to logic and character to intelligence. But they must get rid of their downright contempt for 'cleverness'. They cannot afford it any longer. They must grow less tolerant of ugliness, and mentally more adventurous. And they must stop despising foreigners. They are Europeans and ought to be aware of it.

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully-constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them; to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy;

He wondered, as he had many times wondered before, whether he himself was a lunatic. Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

If one faces facts one must admit that nearly everything describable as Socialist literature is dull, tasteless, and bad

Indeed, when one sees how tramps let themselves be bullied by the workhouse officials, it is obvious that they are the most docile, broken-spirited creatures imaginable.

Tengo mujer y tres hijos. El mayor de ellos no tiene todavía seis años. Podéis coger a los cuatro y cortarles el cuerpo delante de mí y yo lo contemplaré sin rechistar. Pero no me llevéis a la habitación 101

If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor, you can still keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, Im a free man in here- he tapped his forehead- and you're all right

It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which WEALTH, in the sense of personal pos- sessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while POWER remained in the hands of a small privileged caste.

I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.

No se establece una dictadura para salvaguardar una revolución; se hace la revolución para establecer una dictadura

Remember that the bad days are not forever, and the trouble which seems so terrible at last.

Things will happen to you from which you could not recover, if you lived a thousand years. 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, or integrity. You will be hollow.

En realidad, nada era ilegal, ya que no existían leyes.

Su memoria [de Winston] fallaba mucho, es decir, no estaba lo suficientemente controlada.

But that was merely an intellectual decision, taken because he knew that he ought to take it. He did not feel it. In this place you could not feel anything, except the pain and the foreknowledge of pain. Besides, was it possible, when you were actually suffering it, to wish for any reason whatever that your own pain should increase? But that question was not answerable yet.

Cómo vas a tener un eslogan como el de la libertad es la esclavitud cuando el concepto de libertad no exista? Todo el clima del pensamiento será distinto. En realidad, no habrá pensamiento en el sentido en que ahora lo entendemos. La ortodoxia significa no pensar, no necesitar el pensamiento. Nuestra ortodoxia es la inconsciencia.

It is easier – even quicker, once you have the habit – to say In my opinion it is a not unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.

It was a life that wore you out, used up every ounce of your energy, and kept you profoundly, unquestionably happy. In the literal sense of the word, it stupefied you. The long days in the fields, the coarse food and insufficient sleep, the smell of hops and wood smoke, lulled you into an almost beastlike heaviness. Your wits seemed to thicken, just as your skin did, in the rain and sunshine and perpetual fresh air.