Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.
Being in a minority, even in 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.
Aquí ya no estamos (solo) ante lo que habitualmente reconocemos como «literatura» e identificamos con la buena escritura. Aquí estamos, repito, ante energía visionaria. Y no todas las visiones se refi...
You can only rule over a subject race, especially when you are in a small minority, if you honestly believe yourself to be racially superior, and it helps towards this if you can believe that the subj...
From ... the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. ... I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that soo...
It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
We are not interested in those stupid crimes you have committed. The Party is not interested in the overt act: the thought is all we care about.
I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're a...
The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. His heart sank as he thought of the enormous power arrayed against him, the ease with which...
Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power....
Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives but on balance life is suffering and only the very sound or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never...
It is worth saying something about the social position of beggars, for when one has consorted with them, and found that they are ordinary human beings, one cannot help being struck by the curious atti...
To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling again...
Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.
It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.