George Orwell Quotes

How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?

My best fishing-memory is about some fish that I never caught.

To do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife.

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.

Take pleasure in the impact of one sound on another.

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

I have tipped waiters, and I have been tipped by waiters.

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.

Pessimism is reactionary because it makes the very idea of improving the world impossible.

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.

It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith—as mysterious as faith itself.

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.

To accept an unorthodoxy is always to inherit unresolved contradictions

I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.

If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man.

Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.

England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.

The plant is blind but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will continue to do this in the face of endless discouragements.

There are some situations from which one can only escape by acting like a devil or a lunatic.

The stars are a free show; it don’t cost anything to use your eyes

If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can't have any practical result whatsoever, you've beaten them.

It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought...should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.

The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. WHO wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.

A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things.

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.

Human beings were behaving as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.

Probably the best nonsense poetry is produced gradually and accidentally, by communities rather than by individuals.

The four great motives for writing prose are sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.

Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.

Sanity is not statistical.

Perhaps it is only when people are somewhere near the starvation level that they have anything to sing about.

There exists a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere, and when you had to watch your comrades torn to pieces after confessing to shocking crimes.

We were once told that the aeroplane had "abolished frontiers"; actually it is only since the aeroplane became a serious weapon that frontiers have become definitely impassable.

For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.

If there really is such a thing as turning in one's grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.

If one harbours anywhere in one's mind a nationalistic loyalty or hatred, certain facts, although in a sense known to be true, are inadmissible.

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.

You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity.

Can you not understand that liberty is worth more than ribbons?

The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction.

Envy is a horrible thing. It is unlike all other kinds of suffering in that there is no disguising it, no elevating it into tragedy. It is more than merely painful, it is disgusting.

Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible.

He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear.

The words kept coming back to him, statement of a mystical truth and a palpable absurdity.

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

...every human being is doomed to die, which is the greatest of all failures.

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.