Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
And the bigger the fall, the bigger the joke. It would be better fun to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at a curate.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
The four great motives for writing prose are sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, but then fail all the more completely because he drinks.
It is brought home to you...that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior.
. . . it is a corrupting thing to live one's real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it.
We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.
No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
Public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law.
The primary aim of modern warfare ... is to use up the products of the machine without raising the general standard of living.
Man is the only real enemy we have. Remove Man from the scene, and the root cause of hunger and overwork is abolished forever.
The war is waged against its own subjects and its object is not the victory...but to keep the very structure of society intact.
If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any practical result whatsoever, you've beaten them.
The only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.
She's beautiful,' he murmured. 'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia. 'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston.
The tendency of advanced capitalism has been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out, as it once seemed likely to do.
Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me: There lie they, and here lie we Under the spreading chestnut tree.
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.
It is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life.
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.
Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase in pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop.
The typical socialist... a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaler and often with vegetarian leanings.
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.
The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.
Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system.
The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.
But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
When I joined the militia I had promised myself to kill one Fascist - after all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct.
A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.
There is a minority of gifted, willfuf people who are determined to live their own lives to the end, and writers belong in this class.
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.
Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.
[T]he outcry against killing women, if you accept killing at all, is sheer sentimentality.:; Why is it worse to kill a woman than a man?
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.
At any given moment, there is a sort of all pervading orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss large and uncomfortable facts.
Political language... is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.
War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.
One of the effects of a safe and civilized life is an immense over sensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions somewhat disgusting.
At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.
Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.
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.
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.
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.
When I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.
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.
it was only a hopeless fantasy, it passed like an april day, but a look and a word and the dreams they stirred they have stolen my heart away.
Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.