Visit Christopher Hitchens discussion on Orwell at https://bit.ly/2OTYdeI
Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.
In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.
The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.
Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims, but accomplices.
In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.
In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in. They may be illusions, but they are very powerful illusions.
If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
The imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.
No book is genuinely free from political bias.
Every generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. (Opening line of 1984)
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.
Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.
We do not merely destroy our enemies; we change them.
One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.
There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.
Let's face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.
If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.
Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labour. War is a way of shattering to pieces, or pouring into the stratosphere, or sinking in the depths of the sea, materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable, and hence, in the long run, too intelligent.
It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.
Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the 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.
If there really is such a thing as turning in one's grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.
He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.
The stars are a free show; it don’t cost anything to use your eyes.
But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.
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