George Orwell Quotes - Page 2

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.

He who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past.

War is peace.
Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.

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.

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 persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

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

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.

Ce știm noi despre orișice, pe altă cale decât cu ajutorul minții noastre? Totul se petrece, de fapt, în mintea noastră. Ceea ce se petrece în toate mințile în același timp - acela este adevărul.

On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

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 mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?

Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on-that is, badly.

It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones

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

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.

I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put if off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.

...every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures.

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?