George Orwell: Zitate auf Englisch (seite 15)

“Always eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or bed- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimeters in your skull.”

“It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were clasped together. He had time to learn every detail of her hand.”

“We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing.”

“Despotic governments can stand 'moral force' till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.”

“What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.”

“Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible.”

“Some hams hanging in the kitchen were taken out for burial”

“It is impossible to found a civilization on fear and hatred and cruelty. It would never endure.'
'Why not?'
'It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.”

“At night all cats are grey.”

“How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?”

“And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?”

“If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event,—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.”

“Tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country.”

“Those who abjure violence can only do so by others committing violence on their behalf.”

“Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.”

“How could you communicate with the future? It was impossible. Either the future would resemble the present in which case it would not listen to him, or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.”

“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.”

“So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.”

“The more men you've had, the more I love you.”