George Orwell

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

“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 i...”

“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 min...”

“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.”

“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 B...”

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

“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 essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.”

“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.”

“To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contra...”

“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 b...”

“To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: Fr...”

“All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.”

“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. The object of p...”

“The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.”

“In a way, the world−view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because...”

“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 organisat...”

“Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.”