George Orwell Quotes
JonesReport.com |
June 23, 2008
Advertising is the rattling
of a stick inside a swill bucket.
- George Orwell
Early in life I had noticed
that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper. - George
Orwell
War against a foreign
country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit
from it.
George Orwell
No advance in wealth, no
softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a
millimeter nearer. - George Orwell
All the war-propaganda, all
the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not
fighting. - George Orwell
Each generation imagines
itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than
the one that comes after it. - George Orwell
War is a way
of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the
masses too comfortable and... too intelligent. - George Orwell
A dirty joke is a sort of mental
rebellion.
George Orwell
A family with the wrong members in
control; that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a
phrase.
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
Advertising is the rattling of a stick
inside a swill bucket.
George Orwell
All animals are equal, but some animals
are more equal than others.
George Orwell
All political thinking for years past
has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it
coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be
ignored when they are unwelcome.
George Orwell
All the war-propaganda, all the
screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not
fighting.
George Orwell
As I write, highly civilized human
beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.
George Orwell
As with the Christian religion, the
worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
George Orwell
At fifty everyone has the face he
deserves.
George Orwell
Big Brother is watching you.
George Orwell
But if thought corrupts language,
language can also corrupt thought.
George Orwell
Dickens is one of those authors who are well
worth stealing.
George Orwell
Doublethink means the power of holding
two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of
them.
George Orwell
During times of universal deceit,
telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
George Orwell
Each generation imagines itself to be
more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that
comes after it.
George Orwell
Early in life I had noticed that no
event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
George Orwell
Enlightened people seldom or never
possess a sense of responsibility.
George Orwell
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.
George Orwell
For a creative writer possession of the
"truth" is less important than emotional sincerity.
George Orwell
Four legs good, two legs bad.
George Orwell
Freedom is the freedom to say that two
plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
George Orwell
Freedom is the right to tell people what
they do not want to hear.
George Orwell
Good writing is like a windowpane.
George Orwell
Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
George Orwell
He was an embittered atheist, the sort
of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.
George Orwell
I doubt whether classical education ever
has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.
George Orwell
I sometimes think that the price of
liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.
George Orwell
I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's
a thin man inside every fat man.
George Orwell
If liberty means anything at all, it
means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
George Orwell
If you have embraced a creed which
appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which
you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves
that you are in the right?
George Orwell
If you want a vision of the future,
imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
George Orwell
In a time of universal deceit - telling
the truth is a revolutionary act.
George Orwell
In our age there is no such thing as
'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself
is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
George Orwell
In our time political speech and writing
are largely the defense of the indefensible.
George Orwell
In times of universal deceit, telling
the truth will be a revolutionary act.
George Orwell
It is almost universally felt that when
we call a country democratic we are praising it; consequently, the defenders of
every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might
have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.
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
Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine
pedant.
George Orwell
Language ought to be the joint creation
of poets and manual workers.
George Orwell
Liberal: a power worshipper without
power.
George Orwell
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
(Mankind) is not likely to salvage
civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is
independent of heaven and hell.
George Orwell
Many people genuinely do not want to be
saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have
never felt much temptation to be human beings.
George Orwell
Men are only as good as their technical
development allows them to be.
George Orwell
Men can only be happy when they do not
assume that the object of life is happiness.
George Orwell
Most people get a fair amount of fun out
of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or
the very foolish imagine otherwise.
George Orwell
Myths which are believed in tend to
become true.
George Orwell
Nationalism is power hunger tempered by
self-deception.
George Orwell
No advance in wealth, no softening of
manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter
nearer.
George Orwell
No one can look back on his schooldays
and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.
George Orwell
Not to expose your true feelings to an
adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
George Orwell
Oceania was at war with Eurasia;
therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.
George Orwell
On the whole, human beings want to be
good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
George Orwell
One can love a child, perhaps, more
deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child
feels any love in return.
George Orwell
One cannot really be a Catholic and
grown up.
George Orwell
One does not establish a dictatorship in
order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a
dictatorship.
George Orwell
Part of the reason for the ugliness of
adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and
few faces are at their best when seen from below.
George Orwell
Patriotism is usually stronger than
class hatred, and always stronger than internationalism.
George Orwell
People sleep peaceably in their beds at
night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
George Orwell
Political chaos is connected with the
decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting
at the verbal end.
George Orwell
Political language... is designed to make
lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of
solidity to pure wind.
George Orwell
Power is not a means, it is an end. One
does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes
the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
George Orwell
Probably the battle of Waterloo was won
on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars
have been lost there.
George Orwell
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.
George Orwell
Progress is not an illusion, it happens,
but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
George Orwell
Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of
books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not
only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books
about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.
George Orwell
Saints should always be judged guilty
until they are proved innocent.
George Orwell
Serious sport has nothing to do with
fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all
rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war
minus the shooting.
George Orwell
Serious sport is war minus the shooting.
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
Society has always seemed to demand a
little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
George Orwell
Sometimes the first duty of intelligent
men is the restatement of the obvious.
George Orwell
The aim of a joke is not to degrade the
human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.
George Orwell
The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always
damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the
most anarchical of all forms of literature.
George Orwell
The atom bombs are piling up in the factories,
the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the
loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.
George Orwell
The best books... are those that tell
you what you know already.
George Orwell
The Catholic and the Communist are alike
in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.
George Orwell
The essence of being human is that one
does not seek perfection.
George Orwell
The essential act of war is destruction,
not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.
George Orwell
The great enemy of clear language is
insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims,
one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a
cuttlefish squirting out ink.
George Orwell
The idea really came to me the day I got
my new false teeth.
George Orwell
The intellectual is different from the
ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then
not all the time.
George Orwell
The nationalist not only does not
disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable
capacity for not even hearing about them.
George Orwell
The nationalist not only does not
disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, he has a remarkable
capacity for not even hearing about them.
George Orwell
The quickest way of ending a war is to
lose it.
George Orwell
The quickest way to end a war is to lose
it.
George Orwell
The very concept of objective truth is
fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.
George Orwell
There are some ideas so wrong that only
a very intelligent person could believe in them.
George Orwell
There is hardly such a thing as a war in
which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of
less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.
George Orwell
To an ordinary human being, love means
nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
George Orwell
To survive it is often necessary to
fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
George Orwell
To walk through the ruined cities of
Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.
George Orwell
War against a foreign country only
happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.
George Orwell
War is a way of shattering to pieces...
materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable
and... too intelligent.
George Orwell
War is evil, but it is often the lesser
evil.
George Orwell
War is peace. Freedom is slavery.
Ignorance is strength.
George Orwell
War is war. The only good human being is
a dead one.
George Orwell
We have now sunk to a depth at which
restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
George Orwell
We have now sunk to a depth at which the
restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.
George Orwell
We may find in the long run that tinned
food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
George Orwell
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
We sleep safe in our beds because rough
men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.
George Orwell
What can you do against the lunatic who
is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and
then simply persists in his lunacy?
George Orwell
Whatever is funny is subversive, every
joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
George Orwell
When it comes to the pinch, human beings
are heroic.
George Orwell
Who controls the past controls the
future. Who controls the present controls the past.
George Orwell
Whoever is winning at the moment will
always seem to be invincible.
George Orwell