313 quotes
Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two plus two will make five when the Leader says so.
Football, it seemed to me, is not really played for the pleasure of kicking the ball about, but is a species of fighting.
Orthodoxy is the ability to say two and two make five when faith requires it.
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
Antisemitism, for instance, is simply not the doctrine of a grown-up person.
As I Please (1943)
It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence.
Having defeated your enemy you have to choose (unless you want another war within a generation) between exterminating him and treating him generously.
As I Please (1943)
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
Not to have a national anthem would be logical.
As I Please (1943)
But it takes a war to make map-reading popular.
As I Please (1943)
If you have no money, men won't care for you, women won't love you; won't, that is, care for you or love you the last little bit that matters.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)
The world is suffering from a kind of mental illness which must be diagnosed before it can be cured.
After all, it's only what Marx said. Every ideology is a reflection of economic circumstances.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)
Particularly on the Left, political thought is a sort of masturbation fantasy in which the world of facts hardly matters.
Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not money, I am become as a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936)
It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.
Down and Out in Paris and London (1933)
Those who "abjure" violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.
Human beings were behaving as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.
Homage to Catalonia (1938)
We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.
Therefore there is always the danger that the United States will break up any European coalition by drawing Britain out of it.