George Orwell Quotes

“Apparently nothing will ever teach these people that the other 99 % of the population exist.”

“The urge to shout filthy words at the top of his voice was as strong as ever.”

“The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually, the three philosophies are barely distinguishable.”

“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.”

“In any form of art designed to appeal to large numbers of people,...[t]he rich man is usually 'bad', and his machinations are invariably frustrated.:; 'Good poor man defeats bad rich man' is an accepted formula.”

“We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future.”

“Let's face it: our lives are miserable, laborious, and short.”

“Tragedy, he precieved, belonged to the ancient time, to a time when there were still privacy, love, and friendship, and when the members of a family stood by one another without needing to know the reason.”

“It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda tours.”

“International football is the continuation of war by other means.”

“The very word 'war', therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. ... War is Peace.”

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.”

“they say that time heals all things, they say you can always forget; but the smiles and the tears across the years they twist my heart strings yet!”

“Under the spreading chestnut tree I sold you and you sold me: There lie they, and here lie we Under the spreading chestnut tree.”

“He had moved from thought to words, and now from words to actions.”

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

“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.”

“Records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth.”

“In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people - the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.”

“For a creative writer possession of the 'truth' is less important than emotional sincerity.”

“In my opinion nothing has contributed more to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country.”

“Is the English press honest or dishonest? At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news. Yet I do not suppose there is one paper in England that can be straightforwardly bribed with hard cash. In the France of the Third Republic all but a very few of the newspapers could notoriously be bought over the counter like so many pounds of cheese.”

“Every war, when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac.”

“It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children”

“The modern writer who has influenced me most is W. Somerset Maugham .”