Quotes

Political language . . . is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.

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

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid . . . 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.

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

One must choose between God and Man, and all "radicals" and "progressives", from the mildest liberal to the most extreme anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.

One defeats a fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

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

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during "God Save the King" than of stealing from the poorbox.

No one, at any rate no English writer, has written better about childhood than [Charles Dickens].

Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.

[on British imperialism] Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets. This is called "pacification".

[on Stalinist Russia] People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die in Arctic lumber camps. This is called "elimination of unreliable elements". Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.

In an Empire of Lies, telling the Truth is a radical act.

The child and the adult live in different worlds. If that is so, we cannot be certain that school, at any rate boarding school, is not still for many children as dreadful an experience as it used to be. Take away God, Latin, the cane, class distinctions and sexual taboos, and the fear, the hatred, the snobbery and the misunderstanding might still all be there. It will have been seen that my own main trouble was an utter lack of any sense of proportion or probability. This led me to accept outrages and believe absurdities, and to suffer torments over things which were in fact of no importance. It is not enough to say that I was 'silly' and 'ought to have known better'. Look back into your own childhood and think of the nonsense you used to believe and the trivialities which could make you suffer. Of course my own case had its individual variations, but essentially it was that of countless other boys. The weakness of the child is that it starts with a blank sheet. It neither understands nor questions the society in which it lives, and because of its credulity other people can work upon it, infecting it with the sense of inferiority and the dread of offending against mysterious, terrible laws. It may be that everything that happened to me at St Cyprian's could happen in the most 'enlightened' school, though perhaps in subtler forms. Of one thing, however, I do feel fairly sure, and that is that boarding schools are worse than day schools. A child has a better chance with the sanctuary of its home near at hand. And I think the characteristic faults of the English upper and middle classes may be partly due to the practice, general until recently, of sending children away from home as young as nine, eight or even seven.

But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better. The debased language that I have been discussing is in some ways very convenient.

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

Socialists don't love the poor they hate the rich.

Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self deception.

No-one seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it later.

In war, all the screaming hate and propaganda inevitably come from those who are not fighting.

When a war comes, it is never announced as a war, but as an act of self defense against a dangerous madman.

Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

Nothing exists except for an endless present in which the Party is always right.

That which cannot be expressed cannot be thought.

The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.

[from his short-tale "Animal Farm"] All animals were equal, but some animals were more equal than others.

I was born in the Upper Lower Middle Class.

Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is Public Relations.

What I have most wanted to do is to make political writing into an Art.

Looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

O' Brien "Let me put it like this: Is there a Physical Place where the Past exists?"

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking 13.