Political language -- and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists -- is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
GEORGE ORWELL, Politics and the English Language
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
GEORGE ORWELL, preface to Animal Farm
He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.
GEORGE ORWELL, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn't do the hangman's job.
GEORGE ORWELL, The Road to Wigan Pier
There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter.
GEORGE ORWELL, Down and Out in Paris and London
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.
GEORGE ORWELL, Partisan Review, Winter 1945
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.
GEORGE ORWELL, The Lion and the Unicorn
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
GEORGE ORWELL, The English People
Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for "non-attachment" is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.
GEORGE ORWELL, Reflections on Gandhi
Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache.... Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.
GEORGE ORWELL, Why Socialists Don't Believe in Fun
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
GEORGE ORWELL, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket.
GEORGE ORWELL, Keep the Aspidistra Flying
- All animals are equal
- But some animals are more equal than others.
GEORGE ORWELL, Animal Farm
Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.
GEORGE ORWELL, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Sanity is not statistical.
GEORGE ORWELL, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.
GEORGE ORWELL, Confessions of a Book Reviewer
BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.
GEORGE ORWELL, Nineteen Eighty-Four
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