George Orwell Quotes

The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.

I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.

For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.

Orthodoxy means not thinking — not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

Four legs good, two legs bad.

We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.

On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

The only good human being is a dead one.

Sanity is not statistical.

Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.

"You are a slow learner, Winston."
"How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four."
"Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane."