Quotes by George Orwell

“Is a PLONGEUR'S work really necessary to civilization? We have a feeling that it must be 'honest' work, because it is hard and disagreeable, and we have made a sort of fetish of manual work. We see...”

“Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.”

“Sometimes they threaten you with something - something you can't stand up to, can't even think about. And then you say, "Don't do it to me, do it to somebody else, do it to So-and-so." And perhaps ...”

“But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him the horror was that he might also be wrong. ”

“He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort ...”

“At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.”

“This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.”

“The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement.”

“It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought - that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc - should be literally u...”

“We sleep soundly in our beds, because rough men stand ready in the night to do violence on those who would harm us"Orwell cited Kipling's phrase "making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sl...”

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord ...”

“Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.”

“In this place you could not feel anything, except pain and the foreknowledge of pain.”

“On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.”

“For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and ...”

“Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on--that is, badly.”

“He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights.'White to play and mate in two moves.'Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. W...”

“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”