Quotes from George Orwell

let us not pretend that we go into this war with clean hands. It is only while we cling to the consciousness that our hands are not clean that we retain the right to defend ourselves.

What certainty had he that a single human creature now living was on his side? And what way of knowing that the dominion of the Party would not endure forever?

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible

With a faint feeling of satisfaction Winston laid the fourth message aside. It was an intricate and responsible

The dull rhythmic tramp of the soldiers' boots formed the background to Goldstein's bleating voice.

If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable—what then? But

Most modern literary criticism is literary and nothing else—that is, it concentrates on an author's style and thinks it rather vulgar to notice his subject matter.

The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.

Tudo acontece na mente. O que quer que aconteça em todas as mentes, acontece de fato.

Always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation or trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever.

Be more gay, I beseech you!

Still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise…he could not help but share in the general delirium, but this subhuman chanting…always filled him with horror. Of course, he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction.

In England patriotism takes different forms in different classes, but it runs like a connecting thread through nearly all of them. Only the Europeanized intelligentsia are really immune to it.

The best brothel-scenes in literature have been written, without exception, by pious believers or pious unbelievers.

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, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself.

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it[...]Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?

And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.

Therefore, from the point of view of the new groups who were on the point of seizing power, human equality was no longer an ideal to be striven after, but a danger to be averted.

Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you; not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed.

had thought earlier in the night that you can't run when you are sodden from head to foot and weighted down with a rifle and cartridges; I learned now you can always run when you think you have fifty or a hundred armed men after you.

the groveling on the floor and screaming for mercy, the crack of broken bones, the smashed teeth and bloody clots of hair.

La historia era un palimpsesto, borrado y reescrito tantas veces como fuese necesario.

The command of the old despotisms was Thou shalt not. The command of the totalitarians was Thou shalt. Our command is Thou are.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him.