George Orwell

Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache... Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.

But you could not have pure love or pure lust nowadays. No emotion was pure, because everything was mixed up with fear and hatred. Their embrace had been a battle, the climax a victory. It was a blow struck against the Party. It was a political act.

The whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish day-dream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.

People invent new machines and improve existing ones almost unconsciously, rather as a Somnambulist will go walking in his sleep. The interesting puzzle in our times is that we so willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence.

From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face in elegant lettering, the three slogans of the Party:_x000D_ _x000D_ WAR IS PEACE_x000D_ _x000D_ FREEDOM IS SLAVERY_x000D_ _x000D_ IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.

Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.

If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?

He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

International football is the continuation of war by other means.

Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes.

It is brought home to you...that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior.

If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out

The cat joined the Re-education Committee and was very active in it for some days. She was seen one dag sitting on a roof and talking to some sparrows who were just out of her reach. She was telling them that all animals were now comrades and that any sparrow who chose could come and perch on her paw; but the sparrows kept their distance.

She's beautiful,' he murmured. 'She's a metre across the hips, easily,' said Julia. 'That is her style of beauty,' said Winston.

All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers.

Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows.

To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.

The pleasures of spring are available to everybody and cost nothing.

Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.

The essential point here is that all people with small, insecure incomes are in the same boat and ought to be fighting on the same side. Probably we could do with a little less talk about' capitalist' and 'proletarian' and a little more about the robbers and the robbed.

The Communism of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.