Quotes by George Orwell
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In my opinion nothing has contributed more to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country.

One wants to live, of course, indeed one only stays alive by virtue of the fear of death.

Gambling, beer and football filled the horizons of their minds.

Clover was a stout motherly mare approaching middle life, who had never quite got her figure back after her fourth foal.

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invaria.

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

To turn his head and look at her would have been inconceivable folly. With hands locked together, invisible among the press of bodies, they stared steadily in front of them, and instead of the eyes of the girl, the eyes of the aged prisoner gazed mournfully at Winston out of nests of hair.

The real test of character is how you treat someone who has no possibility of doing you any good.

The family had become in effect an extension of the Thought Police. It was a device by means of which everyone could be surrounded night and day by informers who knew him intimately.

If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one. This does not always happen, but it is to be expected, and you ought not to complain if it does happen.

Truth becomes untruth if uttered by your enemy.

Public opinion is less tolerant than any system of law.

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 .

The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think worth describing in detail.

The war is waged against its own subjects and its object is not the victory...but to keep the very structure of society intact.

The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking -- not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.

As soon as you think of fishing you think of things that don't belong to the modern world. The very idea of sitting all day under a willow tree beside a quiet pool -- and being able to find a quiet pool to sit beside- belongs to a time before the war, before radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler.

Windmill or no windmill, he said, life would go on as it had always gone on -- that is, badly.

Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.

It was soon noticed that when ever there was work to be done the cat could never be found.

Right thinking will be rewarded, wrong thinking punished.

All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery.

If pacifists imagine that one can somehow overcome the German army by lying on one's back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen.

What is not hereditary cannot be permanent.

The heresy of heresies was common sense.

Most people approve of capital punishment, but most people wouldn't do the hangman's job.

No man should be allowed to be the President who does not understand hogs, or hasn't been around a manure pile.

The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.

On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

Antisemitism, for instance, is simply not the doctrine of a grown-up person.

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

Within any important issue, there are always aspects no one wishes to discuss.

Every war, when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.

Never use a long word where a short one will do.

It is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during 'God save the King' than of stealing from a poor box.

The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency.

One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ' Socialism ' and ' Communism ' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

Vice is punished, but virtue is not rewarded.

The way to make a million dollars is to start a religion.

All nationalistic distinctions -- all claims to be better than somebody else because you have a different-shaped skull or speak a different dialect -- are entirely spurious, but they are important so long as people believe in them.

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.

The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a physical necessity.

Modern man is rather like a bisected wasp which goes on sucking jam and pretends that the loss of its abdomen does not matter.

However much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back.

If you look for the working classes in fiction, and especially English fiction, all you find is a hole.

To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.

In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people -- the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.

The very word 'war', therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. ... War is Peace.

It had never occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work til it was coarse in the grain like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful. But is was so, and after all, he thought, why not?

We believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism is founded largely on this belief. Don't resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What evidence is there that it does... unless conquered from the outside by military force?

It is quite possible that in only seventy years our population will amount to about eleven millions, over half of whom will be old age pensioners.

And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensive.

The greatest enemy of clear language is insincerity.

Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.

As a rule they will refuse even to sample a foreign dish, they regard such things as garlic and olive oil with disgust, life is unliveable to them unless they have tea and puddings.

Prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.

The human beings did not hate Animal Farm any less now that it was prospering; indeed, they hated it more than ever.

Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly, there is nothing left but quietism -- robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it.

I'm fat, but I'm thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there's a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there's a statue inside every block of stone?

It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.

He Gandhi was not one of those saints who are marked out by their phenomenal piety from childhood onwards, nor one of the other kind who forsake the world after sensational debaucheries.

The main motive for nonattachment is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.

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.

This life we live nowadays. It's not life, it's stagnation death-in-life. Look at all these bloody houses and the meaningless people inside them. Sometimes I think we're all corpses. Just rotting upright.

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed--if all records told the same tale--then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.

At any given moment, there is a sort of all pervading orthodoxy, a general tacit agreement not to discuss large and uncomfortable facts.

We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now.

Waiters are seldom socialists.

If you ask any ordinary reader which of Dickens's proletarian characters he can remember, the three he is almost certain to mention are Bill Sykes, Sam Weller and Mrs. Gamp. A burglar, a valet and a drunken midwife-not exactly a representative cross-section of the English working class.