← They explained that by their studies of the past three months the pigs had succeeded in reducing the principles of Animalism to Seven Commandments. 🔊
← These Seven Commandments would now be inscribed on the wall; they would form an unalterable law by which all the animals on Animal Farm must live for ever after. 🔊
← The Commandments were written on the tarred wall in great white letters that could be read thirty yards away. 🔊
← Snowball read it aloud for the benefit of the others. All the animals nodded in complete agreement, and the cleverer ones at once began to learn the Commandments by heart. 🔊
← As for the pigs, they could already read and write perfectly. The dogs learned to read fairly well, but were not interested in reading anything except the Seven Commandments. 🔊
← It was also found that the stupider animals, such as the sheep, hens, and ducks, were unable to learn the Seven Commandments by heart. 🔊
← FOUR LEGS GOOD, TWO LEGS BAD, was inscribed on the end wall of the barn, above the Seven Commandments and in bigger letters. 🔊
← Boxer passed it off as usual with "Napoleon is always right!", but Clover, who thought she remembered a definite ruling against beds, went to the end of the barn and tried to puzzle out the Seven Commandments which were inscribed there. 🔊
← Curiously enough, Clover had not remembered that the Fourth Commandment mentioned sheets; but as it was there on the wall, it must have done so. 🔊
← A FEW days later, when the terror caused by the executions had died down, some of the animals remembered−or thought they remembered−that the Sixth Commandment decreed "No animal shall kill any other animal." 🔊
← Muriel read the Commandment for her. It ran: "No animal shall kill any other animal without cause." 🔊
← Somehow or other, the last two words had slipped out of the animals' memory. But they saw now that the Commandment had not been violated; for clearly there was good reason for killing the traitors who had leagued themselves with Snowball. 🔊
← Napoleon approved of this poem and caused it to be inscribed on the wall of the big barn, at the opposite end from the Seven Commandments. 🔊
← It was a moonlit night. At the foot of the end wall of the big barn, where the Seven Commandments were written, there lay a ladder broken in two pieces. 🔊
← But a few days later Muriel, reading over the Seven Commandments to herself, noticed that there was yet another of them which the animals had remembered wrong. 🔊
← They had thought the Fifth Commandment was "No animal shall drink alcohol," but there were two words that they had forgotten. 🔊
← And when they heard the gun booming and saw the green flag fluttering at the masthead, their hearts swelled with imperishable pride, and the talk turned always towards the old heroic days, the expulsion of Jones, the writing of the Seven Commandments, the great battles in which the human invaders had been defeated. 🔊
← Without saying anything, she tugged gently at his mane and led him round to the end of the big barn, where the Seven Commandments were written. 🔊
← But it appears to me that that wall looks different. Are the Seven Commandments the same as they used to be, Benjamin?" 🔊
← There was nothing there now except a single Commandment. It ran: ALL ANIMALS ARE EQUAL BUT SOME ANIMALS ARE MORE EQUAL THAN OTHERS 🔊