1,535 Quotes by George Orwell

How right the working classes are in their “materialism.” How right they are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time!

Vivid, beautiful hallucinations flashed through his mind. He would flog her to death with a rubber truncheon. He would tie her naked to a stake and shoot her full of arrows like Saint Sebastian. He would ravish her and cut her throat at the moment of climax.

Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure! On the contrary, it is a deep and heavy responsibility. No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal.

He felt as though he were wandering in the forests of the sea bottom, lost in a monstrous world where he himself was the monster. He was alone. The past was dead, the future was unimaginable.

He was a fattish but active man of paralysing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms – one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the Thought Police, the stability of the Party depended.

Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly.

A Socialist United States of Europe seems to me the only worth-while political objective today.

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer; though, as he well knew, even a back can be revealing.

The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact.