George Orwell Quotes

“I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.”

“Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.... Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants, because sound food is sacrificed to punctuality and smartness.”

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

“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.”

“It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were clasped together. He had time to learn every detail of her hand.”

“Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase in pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop.”

“He would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies.”

“It was with the last revolution and the coming of INGSOC (Inglish/English Socialism) that the latest High learnt how to keep their position permanently - by cultivating ignorance among the other classes and by constantly surveying them through the Thought Police. Part of this strategy included the maintenance of a state of continual warfare, which Goldstein discussed in the third chapter. The three major powers were not fighting this perpetual war for victory; they were fighting to keep a state of emergency always present as the surest guarantee of authoritarianism.”

“The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim-for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives -is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal.”

“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.”

“Processions, meetings, military parades, lectures, waxwork displays, film shows, telescreen programs all had to be organized; stands had to be erected, effigies built, slogans coined, songs written, rumours circulated, photographs faked.”

“It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.”

“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.”

“Reality is inside the skull.”

“Totalitarianism, if not fought against, could triumph anywhere.”

“I do not think one can assess a writer's motives without knowing something of his early development. His subject matter will be determined by the age he lives in ... but before he ever begins to write he will have acquired an emotional attitude from which he will never completely escape.”

“Totalitarianism, however, does not so much promise an age of faith as an age of schizophrenia. A society becomes totalitarian when its structure becomes flagrantly artificial: that is, when its ruling class has lost its function but succeeds in clinging to power by force or fraud. Such a society, no matter how long it persists, can never afford to become either tolerant or intellectually stable.”

“If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?”

“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.”

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

“I'm fat, but I'm thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there's a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there's a statue inside every block of stone?”

“It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.”

“All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers.”

“The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.”

“Mrs Weaver nosed among the books, too dim-witted to grasp that they were in alphabetical order.”