George Orwell Quotes

One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.

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

إن ألد أعدائك هو جهازك العصبي، وما يعتمل في نفسك من توتر قد يورّطك في عمل لا تحمد عقباه.

All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.

The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.

[F]or an intellectual, transference has an important function which I have already mentioned shortly in connection with Chesterton. It makes it possible for him to be much more nationalistic — more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest — that he could ever be on behalf of his native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge. When one sees the slavish or boastful rubbish that is written about Stalin, the Red Army, etc. by fairly intelligent and sensitive people, one realises that this is only possible because some kind of dislocation has taken place. In societies such as ours, it is unusual for anyone describable as an intellectual to feel a very deep attachment to his own country. Public opinion — that is, the section of public opinion of which he as an intellectual is aware — will not allow him to do so. Most of the people surrounding him are sceptical and disaffected, and he may adopt the same attitude from imitativeness or sheer cowardice: in that case he will have abandoned the form of nationalism that lies nearest to hand without getting any closer to a genuinely internationalist outlook. He still feels the need for a Fatherland, and it is natural to look for one somewhere abroad. Having found it, he can wallow unrestrainedly in exactly those emotions from which he believes that he has emancipated himself. God, the King, the Empire, the Union Jack — all the overthrown idols can reappear under different names, and because they are not recognised for what they are they can be worshipped with a good conscience. Transferred nationalism, like the use of scapegoats, is a way of attaining salvation without altering one's conduct.

In the face of pain there are no heroes.

إذا تمسكت بالحقيقة مخالفا العالم برمته فإنك لست مجنون.

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. Everyone writes of them in one guise or another. It is simply a question of which side one takes and what approach one follows. And the more one is conscious of one's political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one's aesthetic and intellectual integrity.

There, comrades, is the answer to all our problems. It is summed up in a single word — Man

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent, but the tests that have to be applied to them are not, of course, the same in all cases. In Gandhi's case the questions one feels inclined to ask are: to what extent was Gandhi moved by vanity — by the consciousness of himself as a humble, naked old man, sitting on a praying mat and shaking empires by sheer spiritual power — and to what extent did he compromise his own principles by entering politics, which of their nature are inseparable from coercion and fraud? To give a definite answer one would have to study Gandhi's acts and writings in immense detail, for his whole life was a sort of pilgrimage in which every act was significant.

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.

Despotic governments can stand 'moral force' till the cows come home; what they fear is physical force.