George Orwell

To do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife , it was called, meaning individualism and eccentricity.

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

And when memory failed and written records were falsified—when that happened, the claim of the Party to have improved the conditions of human life had got to be accepted, because there did not exist, and never again could exist, any standard against which it could be tested.

Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.

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

If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened —that, surely was more terrifying than mere torture and death?

One can cure oneself of the not un- formation by memorizing this sentence: A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.

A State which was . . . in a permanent state of “cold war” with its neighbors.

One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.

He [Kipling] sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilized, are there to guard and feed them.

I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written.

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.

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.

If there is a wrong thing to do, it will be done, infallibly. One has come to believe in that as if it were a law of nature.

The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings—all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene.

The only “ism” that has justified itself is pessimism.

The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W. H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.

[T. S. Eliot achieves] the difficult feat of making modern life out to be worse than it is.

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

The Communist and the Catholic are not saying the same thing, in a sense they are even saying opposite things, and each would gladly boil the other in oil if circumstances permitted; but from the point of view of an outsider they are very much alike.

In Moulmein, in Lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people—the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.

Afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

For my own part I don’t object to old jokes—indeed, I reverence them. When sea-sickness and adultery have ceased to be funny, western civilization will have ceased to exist.

However delicately it is disguised, charity is still horrible; there is a malaise, almost a secret hatred, between the giver and the receiver.

I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant.