Quotes by Orwell, George

"For the ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics) he feels himself master of his fate, but against major events he is as helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavoring to influence the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him."

Orwell, George on acceptance
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"To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization."

Orwell, George on defeat   

"One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship."

Orwell, George on dictators and dictatorship
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"No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer."

Orwell, George on equality   

"All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

Orwell, George on equality
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"We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun."

Orwell, George on food and eating   

"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows."

Orwell, George on freedom
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"I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt."

Orwell, George on freedom   

"To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armor, the apostles of the martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when the time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous."

Orwell, George on generals   

"Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible."

Orwell, George on achievement
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"On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time."

Orwell, George on goodness
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"Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness"

Orwell, George on happiness
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"The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time."

Orwell, George on intelligence and intellectuals   

"A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion."

Orwell, George on jokes and jokers   

"To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up."

Orwell, George on language
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"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."

Orwell, George on language   

"Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers."

Orwell, George on language   

"The high sentiments always win in the end, the leaders who offer blood, toil, tears, and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic."

Orwell, George on leadership   

"A liberal is a power worshipper without the power."

Orwell, George on liberals
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"Four legs good, two legs bad."

Orwell, George on animals   

"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."

Orwell, George on literature   

"The existence of good bad literature --the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously --is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration."

Orwell, George on literature   

"To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others."

Orwell, George on love
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"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?"

Orwell, George on madness
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"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."

Orwell, George on middle class   

"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."

Orwell, George on modern and modernism   

"Myths which are believed in tend to become true."

Orwell, George on myth   

"Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception."

Orwell, George on nationalities and nationalism
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"Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper."

Orwell, George on newspapers   

"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever."

Orwell, George on oppression
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"Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past."

Orwell, George on past
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"The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals."

Orwell, George on perfection
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"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."

Orwell, George on asceticism   

"He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him)."

Orwell, George on atheism
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"Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats."

Orwell, George on autobiography   

"Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible."

Orwell, George on politics   

"Power-worship blurs political judgment because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible."

Orwell, George on power   

"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."

Orwell, George on power   

"Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing."

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

Orwell, George on radicals