Top 100 George Orwell Quotes
#1. It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.
George Orwell
#2. The prime necessities for success in life are money, athleticism, tailor made clothes and a charming smile.
George Orwell
#3. 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.
George Orwell
#4. I have tipped waiters, and I have been tipped by waiters.
George Orwell
#5. The earthly paradise had been discredited at exactly the moment when it became realisable.
George Orwell
#6. 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?
George Orwell
#7. It appeared that even in Barcelona there were hardly any bullfights nowadays; for some reason all the best matadors were Fascists. They
George Orwell
#9. Always yell with the crowd, that's what I say. It's the only way to be safe.
George Orwell
#10. There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word
Man
George Orwell
#11. People invent new machines and improve existing ones almost unconsciously, rather as a Somnambulist will go walking in his sleep. The interesting puzzle in our times is that we so willingly sleepwalk through the process of reconstituting the conditions of human existence.
George Orwell
#12. Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles.
George Orwell
#14. He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.
George Orwell
#15. Ll the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him..
George Orwell
#16. A revolutionary army can sometimes win by enthusiasm, but a conscript army has got to win with weapons,
George Orwell
#17. [T]he imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.
George Orwell
#18. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting.
George Orwell
#19. No animal shall kill any other animal WITHOUT CAUSE.
George Orwell
#20. There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all.
George Orwell
#21. Remember that the bad days are not forever, and the trouble which seems so terrible at last.
George Orwell
#23. I had been in London innumerable times, and yet till that day I had never noticed one of the worst things about London-the fact that it costs money even to sit down.
George Orwell
#24. In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer ...
George Orwell
#26. If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any result whatever, you've beaten them.
George Orwell
#27. On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
George Orwell
#28. When I joined the militia I had promised myself to kill one Fascist - after all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct.
George Orwell
#29. His whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted with an unbearable sensitivity, a sort of transparency, which made every movement, every sound, every contact, every word that he had to speak or listen to, an agony. Even in sleep he could not altogether escape form her image.
George Orwell
#30. That rifle on the wall of the labourer's cottage or working class flat is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.
George Orwell
#31. Of its very nature swearing is as irrational as magic - indeed, it is a species of magic.
George Orwell
#32. By the known rules of ancient liberty. The word ancient emphasises the fact that intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist.
George Orwell
#33. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.
George Orwell
#34. Only because I prefer a positive to a negative. In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.
George Orwell
#35. Fascism has nothing to do with capitalism. Fascism is just a kind of meaningless wickedness, an aberration, 'mass sadism', the sort of thing that would happen if you suddenly let loose an asylumful of homicidal maniacs.
George Orwell
#36. They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself
George Orwell
#37. We of the sinking middle class may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose.
George Orwell
#38. If there really is such a thing as turning in one's grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.
George Orwell
#39. Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxwork displays, film shows, telescreen programs all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked.
George Orwell
#40. If I had understood the situation a bit better I should probably have joined the Anarchists.
George Orwell
#41. 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.
George Orwell
#43. How could the Rice Ring go on skinning the unfortunate peasant if it hadn't the Government behind it? The British Empire is simply a device for giving trade monopolies to the English - or rather to gangs of Jews and Scotchmen.
George Orwell
#44. intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and
George Orwell
#45. Bombing is not especially inhumane. War itself is inhumane and the bombing plane, which is used to paralyse industry and transport, is a relatively civilised weapon. 'Normal' or 'legitimate' warfare is just as destructive of inanimate objects and enormously so of human lives.
George Orwell
#46. The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside
George Orwell
#47. Our civilisation is haunted by the notion that the quickest way of doing anything is invariably the best.
George Orwell
#48. It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.
George Orwell
#49. The old civilisations claimed that they were founded on love and justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy - everything.
George Orwell
#50. Don't you enjoy being alive? Don't you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I'm real, I'm solid, I'm alive! Don't you like this?
George Orwell
#51. Never have ideas about children, and never have ideas for them.
George Orwell
#52. The writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea-leaves blocking a sink.
George Orwell
#53. By ' patriotism ' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life , which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people.
George Orwell
#54. It was like struggling with some crushing physical task, something which one had the right to refuse and which one was nevertheless neurotically anxious to accomplish.
George Orwell
#55. It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.
George Orwell
#56. Yet in the most mean, cowardly, hypocritical way the British ruling class did all they could to hand Spain over to Franco and the Nazis. Why? Because they were pro-Fascist, was the obvious answer.
George Orwell
#57. We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull.
George Orwell
#59. the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They
George Orwell
#60. Women who do not marry wither up - they wither up like aspidistras in back-parlour windows; and the devilish thing is that they don't even know they're withering.
George Orwell
#61. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is possible that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never had much temptation to be human beings.
George Orwell
#62. It was only a hopeless fantasy,
it passed like an april day,
but a look and a word and the dreams they stirred
they have stolen my heart away.
George Orwell
#63. As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
George Orwell
#64. As time goes on and the horrors pile up, the mind seems to secrete a sort of self-protecting ignorance which needs a harder and harder shock to pierce it, just as the body will become immunised to a drug and require bigger and bigger doses.
George Orwell
#65. Ignorance and prejudice are the ballast of our ship of state - however, ships without ballast are not seaworthy and cannot sail in the tempests, nor reach a safe harbor.
George Orwell
#66. The only imaginative prose writer of the slightest value who has appeared among the English-speaking races for some years past.
George Orwell
#67. A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: 1. What am I trying to say? 2. What words will express it? 3. What image or idiom will make it clearer? 4. Is this image fresh enough to have an effect?
George Orwell
#68. And the bigger the fall, the bigger the joke. It would be better fun to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at a curate.
George Orwell
#69. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.
George Orwell
#70. From now onwards he must not only think right; he must feel right, dream right. And all the while he must keep his hatred locked up inside him like a ball of matter which was part of himself and yet unconnected with the rest of him, a kind of cyst.
George Orwell
#71. Mr. Jones, of the Manor Farm, had locked the hen-houses for the night, but was too drunk to remember to shut the popholes.
George Orwell
#72. Poverty is poverty, whether the tool you work with is a pick-axe or fountain pen.
George Orwell
#73. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds,
George Orwell
#74. It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence
George Orwell
#75. Quite apart from anything else, the rule of money sees to it that we shall be governed largely by the old - that is, by people utterly unable to grasp what age they are living in or what enemy they are fighting.
George Orwell
#76. We are the dead,' he said.
'We are the dead,' echoed Julia dutifully.
'You are the dead,' said an iron voice behind them.
George Orwell
#78. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.
George Orwell
#82. Fear! We swim in it. It's our element. Everyone that isn't scared stiff of losing his job is scared stiff of war, or Facism, or Communism, or something.
George Orwell
#84. You wanted a good time; "they," meaning the Party, wanted to stop you having it; you broke the rules as best you could.
George Orwell
#85. The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think worth describing in detail.
George Orwell
#86. Lack of money means discomfort, means squalid worries, means shortage of tobacco, means ever-present consciousness of failure-above all, it means loneliness.
George Orwell
#87. A writer inevitably - and less directly this applies to all the arts - about contemporary events, and his impulse is to tell what he believes to be truth. But no government, no big organisation, will pay for the truth.
George Orwell
#88. It is a horrible thing to have to enter into the details
of inter-party polemics; it is like diving into a cesspool.
George Orwell
#89. Man's greatest drive is not love or hate but to change another person's writing.
George Orwell
#90. The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction.
George Orwell
#91. The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.
George Orwell
#92. But the luxuries of which Snowball had once taught the animals to dream, the stalls with electric light and hot and cold water, and the three-day week, were no longer talked about. Napoleon had denounced such ideas as contrary to the spirit of Animalism. The truest happiness he said, lay in working
George Orwell
#93. It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.
George Orwell
#94. Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi.
George Orwell
#95. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true, that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during "God Save the King" than stealing from a poor box
George Orwell
#97. There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.
George Orwell
#99. He hated her because she was young and pretty and sexless,because he wanted to go to bed with her and would never do so ...
George Orwell
#100. THE SEVEN COMMANDMENTS Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend. No animal shall wear clothes. No animal shall sleep in a bed. No animal shall drink alcohol. No animal shall kill any other animal. All animals are equal.
George Orwell
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