Quotes by Orwell, George

"Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility."

Orwell, George on responsibility   

"Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other."

Orwell, George on evolution   

"Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent."

Orwell, George on saints   

"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."

Orwell, George on school   

"No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy."

Orwell, George on school   

"One of the effects of a safe and civilized life is an immense oversensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions somewhat disgusting. Generosity is as painful as meanness, gratitude as hateful as ingratitude."

Orwell, George on sensitivity
3 fans of this quote   

"But the thing that I saw in your face no power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit."

Orwell, George on spirituality
4 fans of this quote   

"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."

Orwell, George on sports
4 fans of this quote   

"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."

Orwell, George on submission   

"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."

Orwell, George on suffering
4 fans of this quote   

"The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent."

Orwell, George on books - reading
3 fans of this quote   

"Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards."

Orwell, George on candor
6 fans of this quote   

"One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up."

Orwell, George on catholicism   

"To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself."

Orwell, George on survival
7 fans of this quote   

"Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be."

Orwell, George on technology   

"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."

Orwell, George on tragedies
7 fans of this quote   

"To say I accept in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration-camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas-masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press-censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murder."

Orwell, George on twentieth century   

"The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it."

Orwell, George on war
7 fans of this quote   

"There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction."

Orwell, George on war   

"In every one of those little stucco boxes there's some poor bastard who's never free except when he's fast asleep and dreaming that he's got the boss down the bottom of a well and is bunging lumps of coal at him."

Orwell, George on work   

"Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened."

Orwell, George on writers and writing   

"All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand."

Orwell, George on writers and writing
5 fans of this quote   

"For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity."

Orwell, George on writers and writing
3 fans of this quote   

"He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer."

Orwell, George on writers and writing   

"The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life."

Orwell, George on youth   

"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."

Orwell, George on adulthood
4 fans of this quote   

"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."

Orwell, George on children
3 fans of this quote   

"To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay."

Orwell, George on civilization   

"Throughout recorded time... there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other. The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable."

Orwell, George on class   

"To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle."

Orwell, George on common sense   

"The Communism of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated."

Orwell, George on communism and socialism
3 fans of this quote   

"Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them."

Orwell, George on contradiction
5 fans of this quote   

"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?"

Orwell, George on creeds   

"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."

Orwell, George on criticism   

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

Orwell, George on uncategorised   

"WAR IS PEACEFREEDOM IS SLAVERYIGNORANCE IS STRENGTH. "

Orwell, George on uncategorised   

"People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf."

Orwell, George on   

"Een scrupuleuze schrijver zal bij iedere zin die hij schrijft, zich minstens vier vragen stellen: 1. Wat probeer ik te zeggen? 2. Welke woorden zullen dit uitdrukken? 3. Welk beeld of idioom zal dit duidelijker maken? 4. Is dit beeld fris genoeg om een effect te hebben?"

Orwell, George on   

"In sommige schrijfvormen, vooral in kunstkritiek en literaire kritiek, is het normaal om op lange passages te botsen die bijna niets van betekenis hebben."

Orwell, George on   

"De grote vijand van klare taal is oneerlijkheid. Wanneer er een kloof is tussen je echte bedoelingen en deze die je verkondigt, dan maak je als het ware instinctief gebruik van lange woorden en uitgeputte idomen, zoals een inktvis die inkt uitspuwt."

Orwell, George on