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 cuttle...
Four legs good, two legs bad.
They laid me down again while somebody fetched a stretcher. As soon as I knew that the bullet had gone clean through my neck I took it for granted that I was done for. I had never heard of a man or an...
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of...
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
To think, to think, even with a split second left - to think was the only hope.
All nationalistic distinctions - all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect - are entirely spurious, but they are important so lo...
....And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time
We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness," O'Brien had said to him. He knew what it meant, or thought he knew. The place where there is no darkness was the imagined future, which one woul...
Truth is a matter of PerspectiveThere will be my truth and your truth and as Universal truth doesn't exist.
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
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.
Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.
If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives wo...
Sharply the menacing wind sweeps overThe bending poplars, newly bare,And the dark ribbons of the chimneysVeer downward; flicked by whips of air.Torn posters flutter; coldly soundThe boom of trams and...
What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except th...
And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because...
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resis...
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 if it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms like a cuttl...