Quotes from George Orwell

The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself.

But you could share in that future if you kept alive the mind as they kept alive the body, and passed on the secret doctrine that two plus two make four.

Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.' And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting.

he could not—take the sterile and dishonest line of pretending that in every war both sides are exactly the same and it makes no difference who wins.

Science and technology were developing at a prodigious speed, and it seemed natural to assume that they would go on developing. This failed to happen, partly because of the impoverishment caused by a long series of wars and revolutions, partly because scientific and technical progress depended on the empirical habit of thought, which could not survive in a strictly regimented society.

Comprendió que si uno quiere guardar un secreto debe ocultárselo también a sí mismo.

They were like the ant, which can see small objects but not large ones.

He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs

Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also. Who

YaÅŸamlar?n? dünyay? fethetmeye adam??lard?r, ama ayn? zamanda bilirler ki, sava??n sonsuza dek ve zafere ulaÅŸmadan sürüp gitmesi gerekmektedir.

Milk and apples (this has been proved by Science, comrades) contain substances absolutely necessary to the well-being of a pig. We pigs are brainworkers. The whole management and organisation of this farm depend on us. Day and night we are watching over your welfare. It is for YOUR sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples. Do you know what would happen if we pigs failed in our duty? Jones would come back! Yes, Jones would come back! Surely, comrades

In the past every tyranny was sooner or later overthrown, or at least resisted, because of 'human nature', which as a matter of course desired liberty. But we cannot be at all certain that 'human nature' is constant. It may be just as possible to produce a breed of men who do not wish for liberty as to produce a breed of hornless cows.

Todo el secreto estaba en pasarse de unos a otros la doctrina secreta de que dos y dos son cuatro.

We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.

It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were clasped together. He had time to learn every detail of her hand.

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

By the time you have perfected any style of writing, you have always outgrown it.

Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.

One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.

So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take a pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.