If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, “I’m a free man in here” – he tapped his forehead – “and you’re all right.”
—George Orwell
Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose.
—George Orwell
Topics: Censorship
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
—George Orwell
Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
—George Orwell
Topics: Language
Every 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
Topics: Generations
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
Topics: Belief
If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
—George Orwell
Topics: Liberty, Freedom
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
Topics: Tyranny, Power
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
—George Orwell
Topics: Goodness, Virtue
We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.
—George Orwell
Topics: Eating, Weapon, Food
But the thing that I saw in your face no power can disinherit: No bomb that ever burst shatters the crystal spirit.
—George Orwell
Topics: Spirituality, Spirit
One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.
—George Orwell
Topics: Religion
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
Topics: Work
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
Topics: Fanaticism
The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.
—George Orwell
Topics: Intelligence
Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
—George Orwell
Topics: Sincerity, Candor, Feelings
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.
—George Orwell
Topics: Oppression
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
Topics: Leaders, Courage, Heroes/Heroism
He who controls the past commands the future. He who commands the future conquers the past.
—George Orwell
Topics: The Past
History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by neurotics.
—George Orwell
Topics: History
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
Topics: The Military
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
Topics: Success & Failure, Achievement, Power
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for socialism is its adherents.
—George Orwell
To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.
—George Orwell
Topics: Civilization
A liberal is a power worshipper without the power.
—George Orwell
Topics: Liberalism
We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men
—George Orwell
Topics: Duty
What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
—George Orwell
Topics: Madness, Defects
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 squirting our ink.
—George Orwell
Topics: Aptness, Language, Appropriateness
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
Topics: School, Education
I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.
—George Orwell
Topics: Freedom
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Douglas Adams British Author
- John Fowles English Novelist
- Christopher Hitchens Anglo-American Social Critic
- George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) English Novelist
- Bertrand A. Russell British Philosopher, Mathematician
- Arthur C. Clarke English Science-fiction Writer
- Maurice Baring British Author
- Ben Elton English Comedian, Writer
- Anthony Burgess English Novelist, Critic
- J. B. Priestley British Novelist, Playwright, Essayist
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