George Orwell: Trending quotes (page 17)

“The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.”

“If you canthat staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.”

“The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.”

“To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”

“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.”

“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”

“This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.”

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

“At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.”

“Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.”

“No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?”

“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

“Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.”

“One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.”

“All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.”

“The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”

“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.”

“To die hating them, that was freedom.”

“Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.”