George Orwell Quotes

“War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.”

“The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.”

“you can't live life without consequences. They occur regardless of the decision. A consequence is an outcome, good or bad. You can live life without regrets and thats what makes it worth it. Or you could live with regret and end up hanging yourself but thats still good. You paid for the rope so your feeding someones family. Something to be proud of before you kick the bucket”

“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.”

“... ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance... 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.”

“The Seven Commandments: Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend. No animal shall wear clothes. No animal shall sleep in a bed. No animal shall drink alcohol. No animal shall kill any other animal. All animals are equal.”

“Is not anyone with any degree of mental honesty conscious of telling lies all day long, both in talking and writing, simply because lies will fall into artistic shape when truth will not?”

“War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.”

“The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a physical necessity.”

“The only thing for which we can combine is the underlying ideal of Socialism; justice and liberty. But it is hardly strong enough to call this ideal underlying. It is almost completely forgotten. It has been buried beneath layer after layer of doctnaire priggishness, party squabbles and half-backed progressivism until it is like a diamond hidden under a monition of dung. The job of the Socialist is to get it out again. Justice and liberty! Those are the words that have got to ring like a bugle across the world.”

“[You write out of the] desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, etc., etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive and a strong one.”

“The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism.”

“If there is hope, it lies in the proles.”

“Some hams hanging in the kitchen were taken out for burial”

“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.”

“By ' patriotism ' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life , which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people.”

“In the face of pain there are no heroes.”

“The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.”

“So long as they (the Proles) continued to work and breed, their other activities were without importance. Left to themselves, like cattle turned loose upon the plains of Argentina, they had reverted to a style of life that appeared to be natural to them, a sort of ancestral pattern...Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbors, films, football, beer and above all, gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.”

“[...] you can get anything in this world if you genuinely don't want it.”

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

“Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.”

“A man receiving charity always hates his benefactor- it is a fixed characteristic of human nature”

“In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.”

“All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are 'enlightened' all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our 'enlightenment,' demands that the robbery shall continue.”