Quotes

“Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.”

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

“Let’s face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.”

“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.”

“Four legs good, two legs bad.”

“To die hating them, that was freedom.” 

“Merely to be alone, not to be beaten or questioned, to have enough to eat, and to be clean all over, was completely satisfying.”

“What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?” 

“Where there is equality, there can be sanity.” 

“Sanity is not statistical.” 

“If you kept the small rules you could break the big ones

“But if there was hope, it lay in the proles. You had to cling on to that. When you put it in words it sounded reasonable: it was when you looked at the human beings passing you on the pavement that it became an act of faith.”

“Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.” 

“It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones.” 

“It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another.”

“Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”  

“Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” 

“We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.” 

“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.”