1,535 Quotes by George Orwell

I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom of thought and speech - the arguments which claim that it cannot exist, and the arguments which claim that it ought not to. I answer simply that they don’t convince me and that our civilisation over a period of four hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice.

Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban... Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.

But when war becomes literally continuous , it also ceases to be dangerous. When war is continuous there is no such thing as military necessity. Technical progress can cease and the most palpable facts can be denied or disregarded.

Winston reparó de pronto en que la muerte de su madre, hacía casi treinta años, había sido trágica y triste de un modo que ya no era posible. Intuyó que la tragedia pertenecía al pasado, a una época en la que aún había intimidad, amor y amistad, y en la que los miembros de una familia se apoyaban unos a otros sin necesidad de tener un motivo (Cap 3, primera parte - 1984).

...y luego la mentira elegida pasaría a los archivos y se convertiría en verdad (cap 4, primera parte - 1984)

La ortodoxia equivale a no pensar, a no tener la necesidad de pensar. La ortodoxia es la inconsciencia (cap 5, primera parte - 1984)

Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant.

Ultimately it is the Christian attitude which is self-interested and hedonistic, since the aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana. The humanist attitude is that the struggle must continue and that death is the price of life.

If I were forced to compare Tolstoy with Dickens, I should say that Tolstoy’s appeal will probably be wider in the long run, because Dickens is scarcely intelligible outside the English-speaking culture; on the other hand, Dickens is able to reach simple people, which Tolstoy is not. Tolstoy's characters can cross a frontier, Dickens's can be portrayed on a cigarette-card. But one is no more obliged to choose between them than between a sausage and a rose.