George Orwell Quotes

546 Sourced Quotes

I am struck again by the fact that as soon as a working man gets an official post in the Trade Union or goes into Labour politics, he becomes middle-class whether he will or no. ie. by fighting against the bourgeoisie he becomes a bourgeois. The fact is that you cannot help living in the manner appropriate and developing the ideology appropriate to your income.

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

George Orwell
A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.

George Orwell
But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him; the horror was that he might also be wrong.

George Orwell
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.

George Orwell
The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits 'atrocities' but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future.

George Orwell
So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.

George Orwell
Sheer egoism... Writers share this characteristic with scientists, artists, politicians, lawyers, soldiers, successful businessmen - in short, with the whole top crust of humanity.

George Orwell
Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves.

George Orwell
It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

George Orwell
It is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life.

George Orwell
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

George Orwell
Hermione always yawned at the mention of Socialism, and refused even to read Antichrist. 'Don't talk to me about the lower classes,' she used to say. 'I hate them. They smell.' And Ravelston adored her.

George Orwell
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
I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.

George Orwell
He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would never improve.

George Orwell
The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W. H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.

George Orwell
It had become usual to give Napoleon the Credit for every Successful achievement and every stroke of good fortune. You would often hear one hen remark to another, Under the guidance of our leader, Comrade Napoleon, I have laid five eggs in six days or two cows, enjoying a drink at the pool, would exclaim, thanks to the leadership of Comrade Napoleon, how excellent this water tastes!...

George Orwell
It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith-as mysterious as faith itself. Like faith, it is ultimately not rooted in logic; it is a change in the climate of the mind.

George Orwell
Certainly we ought to be discontented, we ought not simply to find out ways of making the best of a bad job, and yet if we kill all pleasure in the actual process of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves? If a man cannot enjoy the return of spring, why should he be happy in a labour-saving Utopia? What will he do with the leisure that the machine will give him?

George Orwell
Oceania was at war with Eurasia; therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.

George Orwell
What was happening was only the working-out of a process that had started years ago. The first step had been a secret, involuntary thought, the second had been the opening of the diary. He had moved from thoughts to words, and now from words to actions. The last step was something that would happen in the Ministry of Love. He had accepted it. The end was contained in the beginning.

George Orwell
We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.

George Orwell
To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.

George Orwell
One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.

George Orwell
The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.

George Orwell
Living a lie the whole time — the lie that we're here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of to rob them … it corrupts us, it corrupts us in ways you can't imagine.

George Orwell
She was very young...she still expected something from life, she did not understand that to push an inconvenient person over a cliff solves nothing.

George Orwell
I have no particular love for the idealised "worker" as he appears in the bourgeois Communist's mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.

George Orwell
Of late years it has been the fashion to talk about Gandhi as though he were not only sympathetic to the Western Left-wing movement, but were integrally part of it. Anarchists and pacifists, in particular, have claimed him for their own, noticing only that he was opposed to centralism and State violence and ignoring the other-worldly, anti-humanist tendency of his doctrines.

George Orwell