Quotes by George Orwell

“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.”

“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: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!”

“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.”

“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 they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.”

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

“He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.”

“I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably youre 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.”

“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?”

“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?”

“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.”

“Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesnt matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.”