Quotes from George Orwell

posterior, afirma: «Un miliciano era un soldado que luchaba contra Franco, pero también un peón en la titánica lucha que se estaba librando entre dos teorías políticas».*

His eyes re-focused on the page. He discovered that while he sat helplessly musing he had also been writing, as though by automatic action. And it was no longer the same cramped, awkward handwriting as before. His pen had slid voluptuously over the smooth paper, printing in large neat capitals DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER DOWN WITH BIG BROTHER

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

Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache.

He knew what it was like: The terrible, agonizing pain which was there all while but could not be suffered yet, because before all else it was necessary to be able to breathe.

We see a man cutting down a tree, and we make sure that he is filling a social need, just because he uses his muscles; it does not occur to us that he may only be cutting down a beautiful tree to make room for a hideous statue.

Alguns anos antes-quantos?-devia fazer uns sete anos-ele sonhara que estava andando em um aposento completamente às escuras. E alguém sentado a um lado disse,quando ele passou:Ainda nos encontraremos no lugar onde não há escuridão. Isso foi dito com muita tranquilidade, de forma quase despreocupada-era uma afirmação, não era uma ordem.

For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realise that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away.

Four legs good, two legs bad.' This, he said, contained the essential principle of Animalism.

As the Party slogan put it: 'Proles and animals are free.

We are the dead," he said. "We're not dead yet," said Julia prosaically. "Not physically. Six months, a year—five years, conceivably. 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.

The Burmese say that when you kill one of these birds they vomit, meaning to say, Look, here is all I possess, and I've taken nothing of yours. Why do you kill me?

In theory I rather admire the Spaniards for not sharing our Northern time-neurosis; but unfortunately I share it myself.

Our civilisation is haunted by the notion that the quickest way of doing anything is invariably the best.

I noticed how the attitude of women varies with a man's clothes. When a badly dressed man passes them they shudder away from him with a quite frank movement of disgust, as though he were a dead cat. Clothes are very powerful things.

It is a commonplace that the Christian Heaven, as usually portrayed, would attract nobody.

It is difficult when you pass that way, especially when you are peacefully recovering from sea-sickness with the plush cushions of a boat-train carriage under your bum, to believe that anything is really happening anywhere. Earthquakes in Japan, famines in China, revolutions in Mexico? Don't worry, the milk will be on the doorstep tomorrow morning, the New Statesman will come out on Friday.

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent. Even

All the best matadors were Fascists.

Raras vezes falava, e em geral quando o fazia era para emitir uma observação cínica — para dizer, por exemplo, que Deus lhe dera uma cauda para espantar as moscas, e no entanto seria mais do seu agrado não ter nem a cauda nem as moscas.

For years i had been resolved - unconsciously at first, but consciously later on - that when once my scholarship was won i would 'slack off' and cram no longer. This resolve, by the way, was so fully carried out that between the ages of thirteen and twenty-two or three i hardly ever did a stroke of avoidable work.

Lo siniestro de la censura literaria en Inglaterra es que en su mayor parte es voluntaria. Las ideas impopulares pueden silenciarse, y los hechos inconvenientes mantenerse en la oscuridad, sin necesidad de prohibición oficial.

El lenguaje político —y, aunque con variaciones, esto es cierto en el caso de todos los partidos, desde los conservadores hasta los anarquistas— está diseñado para que las mentiras suenen a verdad y los asesinatos parezcan algo respetable; para dar aspecto de solidez a lo que es puro humo.

Georges Kopp, on his periodical tours of inspection, was quite frank with us. 'This is not a war,' he used to say, 'it is a comic opera with an occasional death.