George Orwell Quotes

[Hitler] has grasped the falsity of the hedonistic attitude to life. Nearly all western thought since the last war, certainly all “progressive” thought, has assumed tacitly that human beings desire nothing beyond ease, security, and avoidance of pain. In such a view of life there is no room, for instance, for patriotism and the military virtues. Hitler, because in his own joyless mind he feels it with exceptional strength, knows that human beings don’t only want comfort, safety, short working-hours, hygiene, birth-control and, in general, common sense; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flag and loyalty-parades ... Whereas Socialism, and even capitalism in a grudging way, have said to people “I offer you a good time,” Hitler has said to them “I offer you struggle, danger and death,” and as a result a whole nation flings itself at his feet

The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.

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.

* *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 régime, or any other régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.

He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would never improve. Sometimes, he said, when sleeping on the Embankment, it had consoled him to look up at Mars or Jupiter and think that there were probably Embankment sleepers there. He had a curious theory about this. Life on earth, he said, is harsh because the planet is poor in the necessities of existence. Mars, with its cold climate and scanty water, must be far poorer, and life correspondingly harsher. Whereas on earth you are merely imprisoned for stealing sixpence, on Mars you are probably boiled alive. This thought cheered Bozo, I do not know why. He was a very exceptional man.

He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.

The lady in the Rolls-Royce car is more damaging to morale than a fleet of Göring’<nowiki/>s bombing planes.

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

We sleep peaceably in our beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on our behalf.

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.

He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would never improve.

There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter.

إن المساواة بين البشر لم تعد غاية سامية تستحق النضال من أجلها, وإنما خطرا يجب تفاديه.

إن جوهر حكم القلة ليس وراثة الابن لأبيه , وإنما هو استمرارية رؤية للعالم وأسلوب حياة يفرضهما الموتى على الأحياء

ويتفق المجتمع في نهاية الأمر على الإيمان بأن الأخ القائد قادر على كل شيء وأن الحزب معصوم عن الخطأ, ولكن لمّا كان واقع الأمر يقول إن الأخ القائد ليس قادرا على كل شيء وأن الحزب ليس معصوما عن الخطأ , فإن ثمة حاجة إلى مرونة دائمة في معالجة الحقائق.

[Nineteen Eighty-Four] was based chiefly on communism, because that is the dominant form of totalitarianism, but I was trying chiefly to imagine what communism would be like if it were firmly rooted in the English speaking countries, and was no longer a mere extension of the Russian Foreign Office.

There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when 'our' side commits it.