“Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.”
— George Orwell
“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”
“The further a society drifts from truth the more it will hate those who speak it.”
“Big Brother is watching you.”
“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”
“He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.”
“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. ”
“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
“Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.”
“We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.”
“Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.”
“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.”
“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
“Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.”
“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”
“Sanity is not statistical.”
“If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.”
“Until they became conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.”
“Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.”
“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”
“The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.”
“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.”
“Happiness can exist only in acceptance.”
“To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”
“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”
“People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.”
“When I sit down to write a book, I do not say to myself, ‘I am going to produce a work of art.’ I write it because there is some lie that I want to expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing.”
“If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – forever.”
“Free speech is my right to say what you don’t want to hear.”
“Rich people are poor people with money.”
“He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.”
“If there is hope, it lies in the proles.”
“The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lie became the truth.”
“The people will believe what the media tells them they believe.”
“I understand HOW. I do not understand WHY.”
“It’s not so much staying alive, it’s staying human that’s important. What counts is that we don’t betray each other.”
“In the face of pain there are no heroes.”
“But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
“A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud.”
“The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background.”
“He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.”
“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.”
“The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.”
“This life we live nowadays. It’s not life, it’s stagnation death-in-life. Look at all these bloody houses and the meaningless people inside them. Sometimes I think we’re all corpses. Just rotting upright.”
“We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”
“Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me –.”
“You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”
“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.”
“The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.”
“But it was alright, everything was alright, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”
“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.”
“Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose.”
“If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”
“Never use a long word where a short one will do.”
“Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.”
“Four legs good, two legs bad.”
“If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.”
“War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.”
“Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.”
“Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.”
“The fight against bad English is not frivolous.”
“It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”
“All art is propaganda; on the other hand, not all propaganda is art.”
“That rifle on the wall of the labourer’s cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.”
“Right thinking will be rewarded, wrong thinking punished.”
“Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.”
“At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.”
“If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any practical result whatsoever, you’ve beaten them.”
“Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.”
“In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.”
“In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer...”
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.”
“Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.”
“It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith – as mysterious as faith itself.”
“There is no swifter route to the corruption of thought than through the corruption of language.”
“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.”
“My best fishing-memory is about some fish that I never caught.”
“Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges.”
“The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”
“To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.”
“History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
“Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.”
“Orthodoxy means not thinking – not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”
“Serious sport is war minus the shooting.”
“Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime is death.”
“The secret of a successful restaurant is sharp knives.”
“In our time political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.”
“I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don’t want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.”
“The main motive for nonattachment is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.”
“I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.”
“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.”
“High sentiments always win in the end. The leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.”
“Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it.”
“Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”
“We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.”
“The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.”
“Preventive war is a crime not easily committed by a country that retains any traces of democracy.”
“A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, but then fail all the more completely because he drinks.”
“The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a physical necessity.”
“The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”
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