George Orwell (Writer)

A liberal intelligentsia is lacking. Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal , and such truisms as that a machine- is still a machine-gun even when a "good" man is squeezing the trigger … have turned into heresies which it is actually becomingto utter.

— George Orwell man

He is laughing, with a touch ofin his , but no triumph, no malignity. It is theof a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our .

— George Orwell intelligence

Sincehave moreofin countries where traces ofsurvive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-.

— George Orwell democracy

Thebeforebeings, is not, as a , betweenandbut between two evils.

— George Orwell evil

Theis tothat under a dictatorialyou can beinside.

— George Orwell you

I consider that willingness to criticizeandis the test of intellectual .

— George Orwell will

To admit that an opponent might be bothandis felt to be intolerable. It is more immediately satisfying to shout that he is aor a scoundrel, or both, than to find out what he is really like.

— George Orwell media

Looking at theas a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towardsbut towards the reimposition of .

— George Orwell war

The whole idea ofandis a childish day-dream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge.

— George Orwell dream

Each generation imagines itself to be morethan the one that went before it, andthan the one that comes after it.

— George Orwell self

Astate is in effect a , and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible.

— George Orwell thought

So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue tostrongly about prose style, tothe surface of the , and to takein solid objects and scraps of useless .

— George Orwell live

If I had to make a list of sixwhich were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly putamong them.

— George Orwell

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, againstand for, as Iit.

— George Orwell work

In my , nothing has contributed so much to theof the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated.

— George Orwell belief

I had seen little evidence that the USSR was progressing towards anything that one could truly call .

— George Orwell war

Ifmeans anything at all, it means theto tell people what they do not want to hear.

— George Orwell people

Sooner or later a falsebumps up against solid , usually on a battlefield.

— George Orwell battle

Public , because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious , is less tolerant than anyof .

— George Orwell men

Threats to ,and , though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.

— George Orwell respect

It appears to me that one defeats theprecisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's .

— George Orwell self

To the well-fed it seems cowardly to complain of tight boots, because the well-fed live in a different world-a world where, if your boots are tight, you can change them; their minds are not warped by petty discomfort. But below a certain income the petty crowds the large out of existence; one's preoccupation is not withor , but with bad , hard beds, drudgery and the sack.is impossible to a poor man in a cold country and even his active thoughts will go in more or less sterile complaint.

— George Orwell war

In England, a century of stronghas developed whatcalled the stern and ruggedof the police to a point where any public protest seems an indecency. But in France everyone can remember a certain amount of civil disturbance, and even the workmen in the bistros talk of la revolution — meaning the next revolution, not the last one. The highly socialised modern mind, which makes a kind of composite god out of the rich, the government, the police and the larger newspapers, has not been developed — at least not yet.

— George Orwell god

Man is not a , but he is rather like a Yahoo and needs to be reminded of it from time to time.

— George Orwell time

There is a geographical element in all belief-saying what seem profound truths in India have a way of seeming enormous platitudes in England, and vice versa. Perhaps the fundamental difference is that beneath a tropical sun individuality seems less distinct and the loss of it less important.

— George Orwell truth

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of , and have not , I am become as a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of , and understand all , and all ; and though I have all , so that I could remove , and have not money, I am . And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not money, it profiteth me nothing. Money suffereth long, and is kind; money envieth not; money vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. ... And now abideth , hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money.

— George Orwell truth

I Corinthians xiii (adapted)

— George Orwell

They had their cynical code worked out. The public are swine;is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket.

— George Orwell work

Money, once again; all is money. All human relationships must be purchased with money. If you have no money, men won't care for you, women won't love you; won't, that is, care for you or love you the last little bit that matters. And how right they are, after all! For, moneyless, you are unlovable. Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels. But then, if I haven't money, I DON'T speak with the tongues of men and of angels.

— George Orwell love

I am struck again by the fact that as soon as a working man gets an official post in the Trade Union or goes into Labour politics, he becomes middle-class whether he will or no. ie. by fighting against the bourgeoisie he becomes a bourgeois. The fact is that you cannot help living in the manner appropriate and developing the ideology appropriate to your income.

— George Orwell politics

One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words '' and '' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

— George Orwell war

If there are certain pages of Mr 's book, Power, which seem rather empty, that is merely to say that we have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the firstof intelligent men. It is not merely that at present the rule of nakedobtains almost everywhere. Probably that has always been the case. Where this age differs from those immediately preceding it is that a liberal intelligentsia is lacking. Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal , and such truisms as that a machine- is still a machine-gun even when a "good" man is squeezing the trigger — and that in effect is what Mr Russell is saying — have turned into heresies which it is actually becomingto utter.

— George Orwell men

Acceptance of the Catholic position implies a certain willingness to see the present injustices of society continue... Individual salvation implies liberty, which is always extended by Catholic writers to include the right to private property. But in the stage of industrial development which we have now reached, the right to private property means the right to exploit and torture millions of one's fellow creatures. The Socialist would argue, therefore, that one can only defend property if one is more or less indifferent to economic justice.

— George Orwell society

It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.

— George Orwell change

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

— George Orwell men

It is all very well to be "advanced" and "enlightened," to snigger at Colonel Blimp and proclaim your emancipation from all traditional loyalties, but a time comes when the sand of the desert is sodden red and what have I done for thee, England, my England? As I was brought up in this tradition myself I can recognise it under strange disguises, and also sympathise with it, for even at its stupidest and most sentimental it is a comelier thing than the shallow self-righteousness of the left-wing intelligentsia.

— George Orwell time

There is something wrong with a regime that requires a pyramid of corpses every few years.

— George Orwell wit

We are in aperiod ofin which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.

— George Orwell evolution

Even as it stands, the Home Guard could only exist in a country where men feel themselves free. The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. THAT RIFLE HANGING ON THE WALL OF THE WORKING-CLASS FLAT OR LABOURER'S COTTAGE, IS THE SYMBOL OF DEMOCRACY. IT IS OUR JOB TO SEE THAT IT STAYS THERE.

— George Orwell work

Sincehave moreof action in countries where traces ofsurvive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi.

— George Orwell action

Thebefore human beings, is not, as a , betweenandbut between two evils. You can let therule the : that is evil; or you can overthrow them by , which is also evil. There is no other choice before you, and whichever you choose you will not come out with clean hands.

— George Orwell evil

You and I both know that there can be no real solution of the Indian problem which does not also benefit Britain. Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does. It is so obvious, is it not, that the British worker as well as the Indian peasant stands to gain by the ending of capitalist exploitation, and that Indian independence is a lost cause if the Fascist nations are allowed to dominate the world.

— George Orwell work

Both men were the spiritual children of , both had an ironical, sceptical view of life, and a native pessimism overlaid by gaiety; both knew that the existing social order is a swindle and its cherished beliefs mostly delusions.

— George Orwell life

Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.

— George Orwell happiness

Between them these two books sum up our present predicament. Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets, and war. Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war. There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect, which can only happen if the concept of right and wrong is restored to politics.

— George Orwell books

Theis to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside. Quite a number of people console themselves with this thought, now that totalitarianism in one form or another is visibly on the up-grade in every part of the world. Out in the street the loudspeakers bellow, the flags flutter from the rooftops, the police with their tommy-guns prowl to and fro, the face of the Leader, four feet wide, glares from every hoarding; but up in the attics the secret enemies of the regime can record their thoughts in perfect freedom — that is the idea, more or less.

— George Orwell freedom

Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.

— George Orwell dogs

Of course, fanatical Communists and Russophiles generally can be respected, even if they are mistaken. But for people like ourselves, who suspect that something has gone very wrong with the Soviet Union, I consider that willingness to criticize Russia andis the test of intellectual honesty. It is the only thing that from a literary intellectual's point of view is really dangerous.

— George Orwell people

Stop to consider how the so-called owners of the land got hold of it. They simply seized it by force, afterwards hiring lawyers to provide them with title-deeds. In the case of theof the common lands, which was going on from about 1600 to 1850, the land-grabbers did not even have the excuse of being foreign conquerors; they were quite frankly taking the heritage of their own countrymen, upon no sort of pretext except that they had the power to do so.

— George Orwell war

Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Don’t imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet r

— George Orwell war

Particularly on the Left, political thought is a sort of masturbation fantasy in which the world of facts hardly matters.

— George Orwell art

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 life

So far as I can see, all political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee theonly when it coincides with their own , and the most grossly obviouscan be ignored when they are unwelcome.

— George Orwell past

Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows, and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.

— George Orwell law

Scientific education for the masses will do little good, and probably a lot of harm, if it simply boils down to more physics, more chemistry, more biology, etc to the detriment of literature and history. Its probable effect on the average human being would be to narrow the range of his thoughts and make him more than ever contemptuous of such knowledge as he did not possess.

— George Orwell education

The whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish day-dream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.

— George Orwell power

Actually there is little acute hatred of Germany left in this country, and even less, I should expect to find, in the army of occupation. Only the minority of sadists, who must have their "atrocities" from one source or another, take a keen interest in the hunting-down of war criminals and quislings.

— George Orwell war

The relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion. The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.

— George Orwell freedom

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 war

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 self

Decline of the English Murder

— George Orwell murder

Anyone who cares to examine my work will see that even when it is downright propaganda it contains much that a full-time politician would consider irrelevant. I am not able, and do not want, completely to abandon the world view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the Earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.It is not easy. It raises problems of construction and of language, and it raises in a new way the problem of truthfulness.

— George Orwell love

Theand other events in 1936-7 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects.

— George Orwell writing

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

— George Orwell pain

If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly putamong them.

— George Orwell books

Since the decay of the belief in personal immortality, death has never seemed funny, and it will be a long time before it does so again. Hence the disappearance of the facetious epitaph, once a common feature of country churchyards. I should be astonished to see a comic epitaph dated later than 1850. There is one in Kew, if I remember rightly, which might be about that date. About half the tombstone is covered with a long panegyric on his dead wife by a bereaved husband: at the bottom of the stone is a later inscription which reads, ‘Now he’s gone, too’.'

— George Orwell death

In my opinion, nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated. And so for the last ten years, I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the socialist movement.

— George Orwell belief

The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.

— George Orwell evolution

If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.

— George Orwell war

I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom of thought and speech — the arguments which claim that it cannot exist, and the arguments which claim that it ought not to. I answer simply that they don't convince me and that our civilization over a period of four hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice. For quite a decade past I have believed that the existing Russian r

— George Orwell freedom

By the known rules of ancient liberty.The word ancient emphasizes the fact that intellectual freedom is a deep-rooted tradition without which our characteristic western culture could only doubtfully exist. From that tradition many of our intellectuals are visibly turning away. They have accepted the principle that a book should be published or suppressed, praised or damned, not on its merits but according to political expediency. And others who do not actually hold this view assent to it from sheer cowardice.

— George Orwell war

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

— George Orwell people

The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

— George Orwell time

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

— George Orwell struggle

Certainly we ought to be discontented, we ought not simply to find out ways of making the best of a bad job, and yet if we kill all pleasure in the actual process of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves? If a man cannot enjoy the return of spring, why should he be happy in a labour-saving Utopia? What will he do with the leisure that the machine will give him?

— George Orwell life

By preaching the doctrine that nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus energy except in hatred and leader worship.

— George Orwell man

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.

— George Orwell art

In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by "thou shalt not", the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by "love" or "reason", he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.

— George Orwell love

People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has man invented that even approaches in cruelty to some of the commoner diseases? "Natural" death, almost by definition, means something slow, smelly and painful.

— George Orwell death

While the game of deadlocks and bottle-necks goes on, another more serious game is also being played. It is governed by two axioms. One is that there can be no peace without a general surrender of sovereignty: the other is that no country capable of defending its sovereignty ever surrenders it. If one keeps these axioms in mind one can generally see the relevant facts in international affairs through the smoke-screen with which the newspapers surround them.

— George Orwell peace

But is it really necessary, in 1947, to teach children to use expressions like "native" and "Chinaman"?

— George Orwell children

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 man

If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one. This does not always happen, but it is to be expected, and you ought not to complain if it does happen.

— George Orwell you

A normal human being does not want the Kingdom of Heaven: he wants life on earth to continue. This is not solely because he is "weak," "sinful" and anxious for a "good time." 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. Ultimately it is the Christian attitude which is self-interested and hedonistic, since the aim is always to get away from the painful struggle of earthly life and find eternal peace in some kind of Heaven or Nirvana. The humanist attitude is that the struggle must continue and that death is the price of life.

— George Orwell life

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

— George Orwell truth

Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.

— George Orwell writing

I always disagree, however, when people end up saying that we can only combat Communism, Fascism or what not if we develop an equal fanaticism. It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence.

— George Orwell intelligence

It is difficult for a statesman who still has a political future to reveal everything that he knows: and in a profession in which one is a baby at 50 and middle-aged at seventy-five, it is natural that anyone who has not actually been disgraced should feel that he still has a future.

— George Orwell future

One cannot really be Catholic & grown-up.

— George Orwell real

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

— George Orwell

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

— George Orwell true

seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing .

— George Orwell sin

AtI do not feel I have seen more than the fringe of .

— George Orwell

Poverty is what I'm writing about.

— George Orwell writing

The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people — people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from normal standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words.

— George Orwell life

For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.

— George Orwell money

Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though all one's blood had been pumped out and lukewarm water substituted.

— George Orwell war

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