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(no category)
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All animals are equalBut some animals are more equal than others
-George Orwell
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WAR IS PEACEFREEDOM IS SLAVERYIGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.
-George Orwell
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Acceptance
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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.
-George Orwell
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Animals
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Four legs good, two legs bad.
-George Orwell
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Atheism
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He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him).
-George Orwell
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Authors & Writing
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I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.
-George Orwell, Why I Write
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Mr Wells
-George Orwell, essay Wells, Hitler And The World State
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A scrupulous writer in every sentence that he writes will ask himself. . . What am I trying to say? What words will express it?...And he probably asks himself. . . Could I put it more shortly? But you are not obliged to go to all this trouble. You can shirk it by simply throwing open your mind and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you
-George Orwell, "Horizon", April, 1947
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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.
-George Orwell
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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.
-George Orwell
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For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.
-George Orwell
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Belief
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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
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Books
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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
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Children
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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
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Civilization
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To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.
-George Orwell
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Class
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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.
-George Orwell
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Common Sense
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To see what is in front of one's nose requires a constant struggle.
-George Orwell
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Contradiction
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Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
-George Orwell
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Criticism
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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
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Defeat
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To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.
-George Orwell
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Education
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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
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No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.
-George Orwell
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Equality
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All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
-George Orwell
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No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.
-George Orwell
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Fanaticism
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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.
-George Orwell
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Food
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We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
-George Orwell
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Freedom
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Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-George Orwell
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I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.
-George Orwell
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Future, The
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Power is not a means; it is an end....
Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself....
The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy - everything.... No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends....
We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science.... There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always - do not forget this, Winston - always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless....
If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.
-George Orwell, 1984
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Goodness
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On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
-George Orwell
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Happiness
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Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness
-George Orwell
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Heroes/Heroism
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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.
-George Orwell, The Art of Donald McGill
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History
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History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by neurotics.
-George Orwell, essay
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Kindness
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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.
-George Orwell
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Language
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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.
-George Orwell
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Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
-George Orwell
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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 spurting out ink.
-George Orwell, Politics and the English Language, 1946
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Legacy
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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.
-George Orwell
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Liberalism
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A liberal is a power worshipper without the power.
-George Orwell
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Love
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To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
-George Orwell
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Maturity
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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
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Military, the
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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.
-George Orwell
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Modern, Modernism
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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
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Myths, Mythology
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Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
-George Orwell
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Nation, Nationality, Nationalism
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Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
-George Orwell
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News
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Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
-George Orwell
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Nudity
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The girl with dark hair was coming towards them across the field. With what seemed a single movement she tore off her clothes and flung them disdainfully aside. Her body was white and smooth, but it aroused no desire in him, indeed he barely looked at it. What overwhelmed him in that instant was admiration for the gesture with which she had thrown her clothes aside. With its grace and carelessness it seemed to annihilate a whole culture, a whole system of thought, as though Big Brother and the Party and the Thought Police could all be swept into nothingness by a single splendid movement of the arm.
-George Orwell, 1984, Pt 1 ch 3
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Past, the
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Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
-George Orwell
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He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past.
-George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, pt. 2, ch. 9, 1949
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Perfection
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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.
-George Orwell
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Politics
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Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.
-George Orwell
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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
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Poverty
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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.
-George Orwell
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People have often said to me, 'Surely when you are with the tramps they don't really accept you as one of themselves? Surely they notice that you are different--notice the difference of accent?' etc., etc. As a matter of fact, a fair proportion of tramps, well over a quarter I should say, notice nothing of the kind. To begin with, many people have no ear for accent and judge you entirely by your clothes. I was often struck by this fact when I was begging at back doors. Some people were obviously surprised by my 'educated' accent, others completely failed to notice it; I was dirty and ragged and that was all they saw. Again, tramps come from all parts of the British Isles and the variation in English accents is enormous. A tramp is used to hearing all kinds of accents among his mates, some of them so strange to him that he can hardly understand them, and a man from, say, Cardiff or Durham or Dublin does not necessarily know which of the south English accents is an 'educated' one. In any case men with 'educated' accents, though rare among tramps, are not unknown. But even when tramps are aware that you are of different origin from themselves, it does not necessarily alter their attitude. From their point of view all that matters is that you, like themselves, are 'on the bum'. And in that world it is not done to ask too many questions. You can tell people the history of your life if you choose, and most tramps do so on the smallest provocation, but you are under no compulsion to tell it and whatever story you tell will be accepted without question. Even a bishop could be at home among tramps if he wore the right clothes; and even if they knew he was a bishop it might not make any difference, provided that they also knew or believed that he was genuinely destitute. Once you are in that world and seemingly of it, it hardly matters what you have been in the past. It is a sort of world-within-a-world where everyone is equal, a small squalid democracy...
-George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (ch. 10)
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Power
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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.
-George Orwell
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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
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Progress
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Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
-George Orwell
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Reading
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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...
-George Orwell, Riding Down from Bangor
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Religion
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One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.
-George Orwell
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Responsibility
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Enlightened people seldom or never possess a sense of responsibility.
-George Orwell
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Revolution
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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.
-George Orwell
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By revolution we become more ourselves, not less.
http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011.txt
-George Orwell, from the essay The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius, 1941
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Saint, Saints
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Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
-George Orwell
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Security
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You sleep safe in your beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do you harm.
possible source: bbc broadcast april 4, 1942
-George Orwell, (attributed)
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Kipling sees clearly that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less civilised, are there to guard and feed them.
-George Orwell, essay, 1942
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Sincerity
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Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
-George Orwell
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Slavery
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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
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Society
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Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
-George Orwell, A Collection of Essays
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Speeches (oratory)
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Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable and to give an appearance of solidarity to pure wind.
-George Orwell, as quoted in Sonia Orwell's and Ian Angus' The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (1968)
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Spirituality
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But the thing that I saw in your face no power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit.
-George Orwell
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Sports
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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, Shooting an Elephant, The Sporting Spirit, 1950
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Success & Failure
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Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
-George Orwell
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Suffering
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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
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Survival
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To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
-George Orwell
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Technology
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Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.
-George Orwell
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Tragedy
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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
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Truth
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During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
-George Orwell
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Twentieth Century
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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.
-George Orwell
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Tyranny
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One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.
-George Orwell
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War
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The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
-George Orwell
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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.
-George Orwell
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The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word 'war', therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and been replaced by something quite different. The effect would be much the same if the three super-states, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever from the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This
-George Orwell, 1984, Chapter 17
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Wealth
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Economically, no doubt, there are only two classes, the rich and the poor, but socially there is a whole hierarchy of classes, and the manners and traditions learned by each class in childhood are not only very different but--this is the essential point--generally persist from birth to death. 'Hence the anomalous individuals that you find in every class of society. You find writers like Wells and Bennett who have grown immensely rich and have yet preserved intact their lower-middle-class Nonconformist prejudices; you find millionaires who cannot pronounce their aitches; you find petty shopkeepers whose income is far lower than that of the bricklayer and who, nevertheless, consider themselves (and are considered) the bricklayer's social superiors; you find board-school boys ruling Indian provinces and public-school men touting vacuum cleaners. If social stratification corresponded precisely to economic stratification, the public-school man would assume a cockney accent the day his income dropped below L200 a year. But does he? On the contrary, he immediately becomes twenty times more Public School than before. He clings to the Old School Tie as to a life-line. And even the aitchless millionaire, though sometimes he goes to an elocutionist and leams a B.B.C. accent, seldom succeeds in disguising himself as completely as he would like to. It is in fact very difficult to escape, culturally, from the class into which you have been born.
-George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (ch. 13)
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Work
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The thing that would astonish anyone coming for the first time into the service quarters of a hotel would be the fearful noise and disorder during rush hours. It is something so different from the steady work in a shop or a factory that it looks at first sight like mere bad management. But it is really quite unavoidable...by its nature it comes in rushes and cannot be economized. You cannot, for instance, grill a steak two hours before it is wanted; you have to wait till the last moment, by which time a mass of other work has accumulated, and then to do it all together, in frantic haste. The result is that at meal-times everyone is doing two men's work, which is impossible without noise and quarreling. Indeed the quarrels are a necessary part of the process, for the pace would never be kept up if everyone did not accuse everyone else of idling. It was for this reason that during rush hours the whole staff cursed like demons.
-George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
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Youth
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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.
-George Orwell
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Books by and about George Orwell
