Sourced and curated.

1941

★ 1.9

Clothes are powerful things. Dressed in a tramp's clothes it is very difficult, at any rate for the first day, not to feel that you are genuinely degraded.

A joke worth laughing at always has an idea behind it, and usually a subversive idea.

1933

★ 2.0

Essay

1940

★ 2.0

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.

Politics and the English Language · 1946

★ 2.0

He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him).

Down and Out in Paris and London · 1933

★ 2.1

Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.

Down and Out in Paris and London · 1933

★ 2.1

There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all.

Homage to Catalonia · 1938

★ 2.1

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does.

Homage to Catalonia · 1938

★ 2.1

1943

★ 2.1

There are only four ways in which a ruling class can fall from power. Either it is conquered from without, or it governs so inefficiently that the masses are stirred to revolt, or it allows a strong and discontented Middle group to come into being, or it loses its own self-confidence and willingness to govern. These causes do not operate singly, and as a rule all four of them are present in some degree. A ruling class which could guard against all of them would remain in power permanently. Ultimately the determining factor is the mental attitude of the ruling class itself.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 2.1

By comparison with that existing today, all the tyrannies of the past were half-hearted and inefficient. The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal ideas, and were content to leave loose ends everywhere, to regard only the overt act and to be uninterested in what their subjects were thinking.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 2.1

Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 2.2

DOUBLETHINK means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 2.2

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 2.3

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 2.3

"If there is hope," he had written in the diary, "it lies in the proles."

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie...A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack upon morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 2.3

War is the greatest of all agents of change. It speeds up all processes, wipes out minor distinctions, brings realities to the surface. Above all, war brings it home to the individual that he is not altogether an individual. It is only because they are aware of this that men will die on the field of battle.

1941

★ 2.8

Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as "the truth" exists.... The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, "It never happened"—well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs.

1941

★ 3.6

Essay · Anthology · Historical literature

The relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion. The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.

1943

★ 3.6

Essay · Newspaper · Political literature

1945

★ 3.6

It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs—and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.

Down and Out in Paris and London · 1933

★ 3.7

If you had asked me why I had joined the militia I should have answered: "To fight against Fascism," and if you had asked me what I was fighting for, I should have answered: "Common decency."

Homage to Catalonia · 1938

★ 3.7

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.

1945

★ 3.7

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases—bestial atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder—one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy... The appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved.

Politics and the English Language · 1946

★ 3.7

The stars are a free show; it don’t cost anything to use your eyes.

Down and Out in Paris and London · 1933

★ 3.8

In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.

Good prose is like a windowpane.

1946

★ 3.8

Essay

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

1946

★ 3.8

Personal journal

1949

★ 3.8

Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 3.8

Being in a minority, even 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.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 3.8

When the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.

The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Shooting an Elephant · 1936

★ 3.9

Novel · Allegory · Dystopian fiction

Animal Farm · 1945

★ 3.9

To think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration.

Politics and the English Language · 1946

★ 3.9

The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 3.9

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 3.9

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 3.9

The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 3.9

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

Nineteen Eighty-Four · 1949

★ 4.0

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.