George Orwell Quotes

If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver's Travels among them.

In my small way I have been fighting for years against the systematic faking of history which now goes on.

A minority of the refugees behaved in an exceedingly tactless way, and the feeling against them necessarily had an antisemitic undercurrent, since they were largely Jews.

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not money, I am become as a sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not money, I am nothing. And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not money, it profiteth me nothing. Money suffereth long, and is kind; money envieth not; money vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things. ... And now abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money.

Parsons was Winston’s fellow employee at the Ministry of Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms — one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the thought police, the stability of the Party depended.

If there are certain pages of Mr Bertrand Russell's book, Power, which seem rather empty, that is merely to say that we have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

What he realised, and more clearly as time went on, was that money-worship has been elevated into a religion. Perhaps it is the only real religion-the only felt religion-that is left to us. Money is what God used to be. Good and evil have no meaning any longer except failure and success. Hence the profoundly significant phrase, to make good. The decalogue has been reduced to two commandments. One for the employers-the elect, the money priesthood as it were- 'Thou shalt make money'; the other for the employed- the slaves and underlings'- 'Thou shalt not lose thy job.' It was about this time that he came across The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and read about the starving carpenter who pawns everything but sticks to his aspidistra. The aspidistra became a sort of symbol for Gordon after that. The aspidistra, the flower of England! It ought to be on our coat of arms instead of the lion and the unicorn. There will be no revolution in England while there are aspidistras in the windows.

Yet one of the marks of antisemitism is an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true.

"أوبراين: "كيف يؤكد إنسان سلطته على إنسان آخر يا وينستون ؟"
قال وينستون بعد تفكير: "يجعله يقاسي الألم"
رد أوبراين: "أصبت فيما تقول. بتعريضه للألم , فالطاعة وحدها ليست كافية , وما لم يعانِ الإنسان الألم كيف يمكنك أن تتحقق من أنه ينصاع لإرادتك لا لإرادته هو ؟
إن السلطة هي إذلاله وإنزال الألم به , وهي أيضا تمزيق العقول البشرية إلى أشلاء ثم جمعها ثانية وصياغتها في قوالب جديدة من اختيارنا.
هل بدأت تفهم أي نوع من العالم نقوم بخلقه الآن ؟ إنه النقيض التام ليوتوبيا المدينة الفاضلة التي تصورها المصلحون الأقدمون, إنه عالم الخوف والغدر والتعذيب, عالم يدوس الناس فيه بعضهم بعضا.
عالم يزداد قسوة كلما ازداد نقاء , إذ التقدم في عالمنا هو التقدم باتجاه المزيد من الألم.
لقد زعمت الحضارات الغابرة أنها قامت على الحب والعدالة أما حضارتنا فهي قائمة على الكراهية, ففي عالمنا لا مكان لعواطف غير الخوف والغضب والانتشاء بالنصر وإذلال الذات, وأي شيء خلاف ذلك سندمره تدميراً.

There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all.

أفضل الكتب هي تلك التي تقول لك ما تعرفه بالفعل.

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

I have no wish to take life, not even human life

Even as it stands, the Home Guard could only exist in a country where men feel themselves free. The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. THAT RIFLE HANGING ON THE WALL OF THE WORKING-CLASS FLAT OR LABOURER'S COTTAGE, IS THE SYMBOL OF DEMOCRACY. IT IS OUR JOB TO SEE THAT IT STAYS THERE.