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.
This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on–that is, badly.
We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.
All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.
The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.
A writer inevitably – and less directly this applies to all the arts – about contemporary events, and his impulse is to tell what he believes to be truth. But no government, no big organisation, will pay for the truth.
Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.
But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on to that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable: it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith.
So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.
One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death, but I think, as I thought then, that it is better to die violently and not too old.
…every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures.
He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.
Has it ever occurred to you,’ he said, ‘that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.
He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.
Good novel are written by people who are not frightened.
Gordon eyed them with inert hatred. At this moment he hated all books, and novels most of all. Horrible to think of all that soggy, half-baked trash massed together in one place.
Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.
Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.
I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.
At present nothing is possible except to extend the area of sanity little by little. We cannot act collectively. We can only spread our knowledge outwards from individual to individual, generation after generation.
If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality.
The best books… are those that tell you what you know already.
But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him the horror was that he might also be wrong.
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.
Tragedy, he precieved, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.
There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all.
…the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.
A dull, decent people, cherishing and fortifying their dullness behind a quarter of a million bayonets.
In trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and the enemy. In winter on the Zaragoza front they were important in that order, with the enemy a bad last
Hitherto, the rights and wrongs had seemed so beautifully simple.
When it is necessary they can be prodded into frenzies of fear and hatred, but when left to themselves they are capable of forgetting for long periods that the war is happening.
It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.
Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.
The ruling power is always faced with the question, ‘In such and such circumstances, what would you do?’, whereas the opposition is not obliged to take responsibility or make any real decisions.
The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.
Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.
In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues….
In all the useful arts the world is either standing still or going backwards.
Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties
He is fiddling while Rome is burning, and, unlike the enormous majority of people who do this, fiddling with his face toward the flames.
and then the chosen lie would pass into the permanent records and become truth
She’s beautiful,’ he murmured.’She’s a metre across the hips, easily,’ said Julia.’That is her style of beauty,’ said Winston.
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.
If all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.
They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself
Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is possible that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never had much temptation to be human beings.
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.
Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.
Money, money, all is money! Could you write even a penny novelette without money to put heart into you? Invention, energy, wit, style, charm–they’ve all got to be paid for in hard cash.
For money buys all virtues. Money suffereth long and is kid, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her own
You can be rich or deliberately refuse to be rich. You can possess money, or you can despise money; the one fatal thing is to worship money and fail to get it
He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless,because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so …
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull.
The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?
We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
At the time I could not see beyond the moral dilemma that is presented to the weak in a world governed by the strong: Break the rules, or perish.
Remember that the bad days are not forever, and the trouble which seems so terrible at last.
Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.
Reality only exerts its pressure through the needs of everyday life – the need to eat and drink, to get shelter and clothing, to avoid swallowing poison or stepping out of top-storey windows, and the like.
I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.
It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters.
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold.
The outcry against killing women, if you accept killing at all, is sheer sentimentality. Why is it worse to kill a woman than a man?
People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it.
What now strikes as remarkable about the new moneyed class of the nineteenth century is their complete irresponsibility;they see everything in terms of individual success, with hardly any consciousness that the community exists.
It is only when you meet someoneof a different culture from yourself that you begin to realize what your ownbeliefs really are.
It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realize what your own beliefs really are.
Truth is a matter of PerspectiveThere will be my truth and your truth and as Universal truth doesn’t exist.
Sooner or later it would happen: strength would change into consciousness.
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face–forever.
We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing.
It is only when you meet someone of a different culture from yourself that you begin to realise what your own beliefs really are.
….And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time
[T]he imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.
Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.
It was a vast, luminous dream in which his whole life seemed to stretch out before him like a landscape on a summer evening after rain
For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.
The problem was how to keep the wheels of industry turning without increasing the real wealth of the world. Goods must be produced, but they must not be distributed.
I tell you I can’t be bothered with things like that. I’ve got a soul above buttons.
An illusion can become a half-truth, a mask can alter the expression of a face.
It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.
It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.
The food we were given was no more than eatable, but the patron was not mean about drink; he allowed us two litres of wine a day each, knowing that if a plongeur is not given two litres he will steal three.
With its grace and carelessness, it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though [all] could be swept into a nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm.
All the habits of Man are evil. And above all, no animal must ever tyrannise over his own kind. Weak or strong, clever or simple, we are all brothers. No animal must ever kill any other animal. All animals are equal.
Is it not crystal clear, then, comrades, that all the evils of this life of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings?
…all the evils of ours spring from the tyranny of human beings.
Partly it was a sort of hymn to the wisdom and majesty of Big Brother, but still more it was an act of self-hypnosis, a deliberate drowning of consciousness by means of rhythmic noise.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.
The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.
What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender to them.
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.
And remember also that in fighting against man we must not come to resemble him. Even when you have conquered him, do not adopt his vices.
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?…. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
The paperweight was the room he was in, and the coral was Julia’s life and his own, fixed in a sort of eternity at the heart of the crystal.
The dark-haired girl behind Winston had begun crying out: ‘Swine! Swine! Swine!’, and suddenly she picked up a heavy Newspeak dictionary and flung it at the screen.
England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.
And after that, you don’t feel the same toward the other person any longer.
Winston Smith: Does Big Brother exist?O’Brien: Of course he exists.Winston Smith: Does he exist like you or me?O’Brien: You do not exist.
He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would never improve.
He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him)…
There is a humility about genuine love that is rather horrible in some ways.
A fat man eating quails while children are begging for bread is a disgusting sight, but you are less likely to see it when you are within the sound of the guns.
It struck him that the true characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness.
a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes.
The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.
What mattered was that the room over the junk-shop should exist. To know that it was there, inviolate, was almost the same as being in it. The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
If large numbers of people believe in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it. But if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.
We are not interested in those stupid crimes you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
The tank, the submarine, the torpedo, the machine-gun, even the rifle and the hand grenade are still in use.
Sleep had ceased to be a mere physical necessity; it was something voluptuous, and debauch more than a relief.
The vote was taken at once, and it was agreed by an overwhelming majority that rats were comrades.There were only four dissentients, the three dogs and the cat, who was afterwards discovered to have voted on both sides.
All nationalistic distinctions – all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect – are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people believe in them.
You can only rule over a subject race, especially when you are in a small minority, if you honestly believe yourself to be racially superior, and it helps towards this if you can believe that the subject race is biologically different.
Page after page, advert after advert. Lipsticks, undies, tinned food, patent medicines, slimming cures, face-creams. A sort of cross-section of the money world. A panorama of ignorance, greed, vulgarity, snobbishness, whoredom and disease.
[..] the great modern commandment – the eleventh commandment which has wiped out all the others: ‘Thou shalt not lose thy job.
The Brotherhood cannot be wiped out because it is not an organization in the ordinary sense. Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible.
The only evidence to the contrary was the mute protest in your own bones, the instinctive feeling that the conditions you lived in were intolerable and that at some other time they must have been different.
From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.
The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.
All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes — a fact which is recognized in the extra ration issued to old-age pensioners.
in our age there is no such thing as ” keeping out of politics ” all issues are political issues , and politics itself is a mass of lies , evasions , folly , hatred and .
Progress is not an illusion; it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that can be given a name.
Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxwork displays, film shows, telescreen programs all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked.
When the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom that he destroys.
No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred.
[Football] has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.
And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp.
There were only four dissentients, the three dogs and the cat, who was afterwards discovered to have voted on both sides.
If there really is such a thing as turning in one’s grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.
Anyone who has used that comforting phrase ‘a nice cup of tea’ invariably means Indian tea.
It’s the one thing they can’t do. They can make you say anything – anything – but they can’t make you believe it. They can’t get inside you.
Do you know why you’re here? Shall I tell you why we brought you here? To cure you.To make you sane.
If human equality is to be for ever averted — if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently — then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.
To think, to think, even with a split second left – to think was the only hope.
We sleep peaceably in our beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf”–Opening to “My Father’s Son,” attributed to George Orwell
The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency.
Anything that hinted at corruption always filled him with a wild hope
Tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country.
Patriotism has nothing to do with Conservatism. It is actually the opposite of Conservatism, since it is a devotion to something that is always changing and yet is felt to be mystically the same.
Patriotism is usually stronger than class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.
Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism.
It is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during ‘God save the King’ than of stealing from a poor box
It is impossible to read through the reports in the Communist Press without realizing that they are consciously aimed at a public ignorant of the facts and have no other purpose than to work up prejudice.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?
England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.
Don’t you enjoy being alive? Don’t you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I’m real, I’m solid, I’m alive! Don’t you like this?
…In this place you could not feel anything, except pain and foreknowledge of pain.
If you have no money, men won’t care for you, women won’t love you; won’t, that is, care for you or love you the last little bit that matters.
The mass of the rich and the poor are differentiated by their incomes and nothing else,and the average millionaire is only the average dishwasher dressed in a new suit.
Now, comrades, what is the nature of this life of ours? Let us face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.
He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone – one mind less, one world less.
A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up the details…
I believe that on such an issue as this no one is or can be completely truthful. It is difficult to be certain about anything except what you have seen with your own eyes, and consciously or unconsciously everyone writes as a partisan
Always in your stomach and in your skin there was a sort of protest, a feeling that you had been cheated of something you had a right to.
All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
When it comes to the pinch human beings are heroic.
When it comes to the pinch human beings are heroic.
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.
Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives but on balance life is suffering and only the very sound or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
Before the war and especially before the Boer War it was summer all the year round.
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of polities’. All issues are political issues.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
Who controls the past controls the future who controls the present controls the past.
A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.
No doubt alcohol tobacco and so forth are things that a saint must avoid but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid.
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims one turns as if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
The fact is that certain themes cannot be celebrated in words, and tyranny is one of them. No one ever wrote a good book in praise of the Inquisition.
We are the dead . Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone.
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.
Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.
War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.
Oceania was at war with Eurasia therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.
There are some ideas so wrong that only a very intelligent person could believe in them.
A family with the wrong members in control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.
For a creative writer possession of the ‘truth’ is less important than emotional sincerity.
Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie… a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.
If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics – a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage – surely that proves that you are in the right?
I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.
Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.
Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.