Famous quotes
Quotes by famous people, credited to who said them. Your own quotes must not match any of these. More are added all the time. 1,158,269 quotes Who coined it · How we decide
EnglishItalianoPolskiעבריתFrançaisPortuguêsفارسیEspañol中文РусскийDeutschالعربيةहिन्दी日本語ΕλληνικάLatina
George Orwell
344 quotes
“This means no more than vae victis - woe to the creed that is not backed by machine-guns!”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1931 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Review of The Two Carlyles by Osbert Burdett, in The Adelphi (March 1931)
“To the well-fed it seems cowardly to complain of tight boots, because the well-fed live in a different world-a world where, if your boots are tight, you can change them; their minds are not warped by petty discomfort. But below a certain income the petty crowds the large out of existence; one's preoccupation is not with art or religion, but with bad food, hard beds, drudgery and the sack. Serenity is impossible to a poor man in a cold country and even his active thoughts will go in more or less sterile complaint.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1931 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Review of Hunger and Love by Lionel Britton, in The Adelphi (April 1931)
“In England, a century of strong government has developed what O. Henry called the stern and rugged fear of the police to a point where any public protest seems an indecency. But in France everyone can remember a certain amount of civil disturbance, and even the workmen in the bistros talk of la revolution — meaning the next revolution, not the last one. The highly socialised modern mind, which makes a kind of composite god out of the rich, the government, the police and the larger newspapers, has not been developed — at least not yet.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1932 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Review of The Civilization of France by Ernst Robert Curtius; translated by Olive Wyon, in The Adelphi (May 1932)
“As to a pseudonym, a name I always use when tramping etc is P. S. Burton, but if you don't think this sounds a probable kind of name, what about Kenneth Miles, George Orwell, H. Lewis Allways. I rather favour George Orwell.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1932 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Leonard Moore (19 November 1932)
“Man is not a Yahoo, but he is rather like a Yahoo and needs to be reminded of it from time to time.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1935 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Review of Tropic of Cancer, in New English Weekly (14 November 1935)
“Think of life as it really is, think of the details of life; and then think that there is no meaning in it, no purpose, no goal except the grave. Surely only fools or self-deceivers, or those whose lives are exceptionally fortunate, can face that thought without flinching?”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1935 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: A Clergyman's Daughter, Ch. 2 (1935)
“It is a mysterious thing, the loss of faith-as mysterious as faith itself. Like faith, it is ultimately not rooted in logic; it is a change in the climate of the mind.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is a geographical element in all belief-saying what seem profound truths in India have a way of seeming enormous platitudes in England, and vice versa. Perhaps the fundamental difference is that beneath a tropical sun individuality seems less distinct and the loss of it less important.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Review of Indian Mosaic by Mark Channing, in The Listener (15 July 1936)
“I am struck again by the fact that as soon as a working man gets an official post in the Trade Union or goes into Labour politics, he becomes middle-class whether he will or no. ie. by fighting against the bourgeoisie he becomes a bourgeois. The fact is that you cannot help living in the manner appropriate and developing the ideology appropriate to your income.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Road to Wigan Pier Diary 6-10 February (1936)
“For the dreadful thing about the kind of brutalities here described, is that they are quite unavoidable. When a subject population rises in revolt you have got to suppress it, and you can only do so by methods which make nonsense of any claim for the superiority of western civilisation. In order to rule over barbarians, you have got to become a barbarian yourself.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Review of Zest for Life by Johann Wöller, in Time and Tide (17 October 1936)
“In a town like London there are always plenty of not quite certifiable lunatics walking the streets, and they tend to gravitate towards bookshops, because a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1936 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Bookshop Memories” in Fortnightly (November 1936)
“In addition to this there is the horrible — the really disquieting — prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1937 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) - Full text online
“When I left Barcelona in late June the jails were bulging; indeed, the regular jails had long since overflowed and the prisoners were being huddled into empty shops and any other temporary dump that could be found for them. But the point to notice is that the people who are in prison now are not Fascists but revolutionaries; they are there not because their opinions are too much to the Right, but because they are too much to the Left. And the people responsible for putting them there are those dreadful revolutionaries at whose very name Garvin quakes in his galoshes – the Communists.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1937 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Spilling the Spanish Beans,” New English Weekly, (July 29 and Sept. 2, 1937)
“And so the game continues. The logical end is a régime in which every opposition party and newspaper is suppressed and every dissentient of any importance is in jail. Of course, such a régime will be Fascism. It will not be the same as the Fascism Franco would impose, it will even be better than Franco’s Fascism to the extent of being worth fighting for, but it will be Fascism. Only, being operated by Communists and Liberals, it will be called something different.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1937 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Spilling the Spanish Beans,” New English Weekly, (July 29 and Sept. 2, 1937)
“Later, as power slipped from the hands of the Anarchists into the hands of the Communists and right-wing Socialists, the Government was able to reassert itself, the bourgeoisie came out of hiding and the old division of society into rich and poor reappeared, not much modified. Henceforward every move, except a few dictated by military emergency, was directed towards undoing the work of the first few months of revolution.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1937 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Spilling the Spanish Beans,” New English Weekly, (July 29 and Sept. 2, 1937)
“War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The essential job is to get people to recognise war propaganda when they see it, especially when it is disguised as peace propaganda.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1937 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Review of The Men I Killed by Brigadier-General F. P. Crozier, CB, CMG, DSO, in New Statesman and Nation (28 August 1937)
“You cannot be objective about an aerial torpedo. And the horror we feel of these things has led to this conclusion: if someone drops a bomb on your mother, go and drop two bombs on his mother. The only apparent alternatives are to smash dwelling houses to powder, blow out human entrails and burn holes in children with thermite, or to be enslaved by people who are more ready to do these things than you are yourself; as yet no one has suggested a practicable way out.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1938 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Review of Spanish Testament by Arthur Koestler, February 1938
“One is almost driven to the cynical conclusion that men are only decent when they are powerless.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1938 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Review of The Freedom of the Streets by Jack Common, June 1938, pp. 335-6
“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.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Review of Power: A New Social Analysis by Bertrand Russell in The Adelphi (January 1939)
“It is not merely that at present the rule of naked force obtains almost everywhere. Probably that has always been the case. Where this age differs from those immediately preceding it is that a liberal intelligentsia is lacking. Bully-worship, under various disguises, has become a universal religion, and such truisms as that a machine-gun is still a machine-gun even when a "good" man is squeezing the trigger — and that in effect is what Mr Russell is saying — have turned into heresies which it is actually becoming dangerous to utter.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Review of Power: A New Social Analysis by Bertrand Russell in The Adelphi (January 1939)
“It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two plus two will make five when the Leader says so.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Review of Power: A New Social Analysis by Bertrand Russell in The Adelphi (January 1939)
“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.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Review of Communism and Man by F. J. Sheed in Peace News (27 January 1939)
“Has it ever struck you that there's a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there's a statue inside every block of stone?”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually in the past.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Coming Up for Air, Part I, Ch. 4 (1939)
“Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Adults are only less superstitious than children in proportion as they have more power over their environment. In predicaments where everyone is powerless (eg war, gambling) everyone is superstitious”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: New Words (1940)
“Mr Auden's brand of amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. 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 (1903–1950) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Inside the Whale (1940)
“[...]I should say that it is a good rule of thumb never to mention religion if you can possibly avoid it.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Humphry House (11 April 1940). The Collected Essays, Journalism & Letters, George Orwell: An Age Like This, 1920–1940, Editors: Sonia Orwell, Ian Angus. p. 530.
“[T]here is something wrong with a regime that requires a pyramid of corpses every few years.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Humphry House, (11 April 1940). The Collected Essays, Journalism, & Letters, George Orwell: An age like this, 1920–1940, Editors: Sonia Orwell, Ian Angus. p. 532.
“It is all very well to be "advanced" and "enlightened," to snigger at Colonel Blimp and proclaim your emancipation from all traditional loyalties, but a time comes when the sand of the desert is sodden red and what have I done for thee, England, my England? As I was brought up in this tradition myself I can recognise it under strange disguises, and also sympathise with it, for even at its stupidest and most sentimental it is a comelier thing than the shallow self-righteousness of the left-wing intelligentsia.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From a review of Malcolm Muggeridge's The Thirties, in New English Weekly (25 April 1940)
“National Socialism is a form of Socialism, is emphatically revolutionary, does crush the property owner as surely as it crushes the worker. The two regimes, having started from opposite ends, are rapidly evolving towards the same system—a form of oligarchical collectivism. . . . It is Germany that is moving towards Russia, rather than the other way about. It is therefore nonsense to talk about Germany ‘going Bolshevik’ if Hitler falls. Germany is going Bolshevik because of Hitler and not in spite of him.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Review of The Totalitarian Enemy by F. Borkenau, Time and Tide (4 May 1940). Orwell: My Country Right or Left - 1940 to 1943, Vol. 2, Essays, Journalism & Letters, Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, edit., Boston, MA, Nonparei…
“From the first the aim of the Nazis was to turn Germany into a war-machine, and to subordinate everything else to that purpose. But a country, and especially a poor country, which is waging or preparing for ‘total’ war must be in some sense socialistic. When the State has taken complete control of industry, when the so-called capitalist is reduced to the status of a manager, when consumption goods are so scare and strictly rationed that you cannot spend a big income even if you earn one, then the essential structure of Socialism already exists, plus the comfortless equality of war-Communism.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Review of The Totalitarian Enemy by F. Borkenau, Time and Tide (4 May 1940). Orwell: My Country Right or Left - 1940 to 1943, Vol. 2, Essays, Journalism & Letters, Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, edit., Boston, MA, Nonparei…
“We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1940 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to The Tribune (20 December 1940), later published in A Patriot After All, 1940-1941 (1999)
“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.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1941 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Don't Let Colonel Blimp Ruin the Home Guard" article for the Evening Standard, 8 January 1941
“Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1941 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Art of Donald McGill" (1941)
“The peculiarity of the totalitarian state is that though it controls thought, it does not fix it. It sets up unquestionable dogmas, and it alters them from day to day. It needs the dogmas, because it needs absolute obedience from its subjects, but cannot avoid the changes, which are dictated by the needs of power politics. It declared itself infallible, and at the same time it attacks the very concept of objective truth.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1941 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Literature and Totalitarianism”, a broadcast talk in the BBC Overseas Service; printed in The Listener (19 June 1941)
“Civilisation rests ultimately on coercion. What holds society together is not the policeman but the goodwill of common men, and yet that goodwill is powerless unless the policeman is there to back it up. Any government which refused to use violence in its own defence would cease almost immediately to exist, because it would be overthrown by any body of men, or even any individual, that was less scrupulous.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1941 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: No, Not One," The Adelphi (October 1941)
“Since pacifists have more freedom of action in countries where traces of democracy survive, pacifism can act more effectively against democracy than for it. Objectively the pacifist is pro-Nazi.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1941 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: No, Not One," The Adelphi (October 1941)
“Pacifism is only a considerable force in places where people feel themselves very safe, chiefly maritime states. [...] The notion that you can somehow defeat violence by submitting to it is simply a flight from fact. As I have said, it is only possible to people who have money and guns between themselves and reality.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1941 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: No, Not One," The Adelphi (October 1941)
“The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world: that is evil; or you can overthrow them by war, which is also evil. There is no other choice before you, and whichever you choose you will not come out with clean hands.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1941 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: No, Not One," The Adelphi (October 1941), p. 7-8
“I have now been in the BBC about 6 months. Shall remain in it if the political changes I foresee come off, otherwise probably not. Its atmosphere is something halfway between a girls' school and a lunatic asylum, and all we are doing at present is useless, or slightly worse than useless.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1942 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Diary entry (14 March 1942)
“In this war we have one weapon which our enemies cannot use against us, and that is the English language. Several other languages are spoken by larger numbers of people, but there is no other that has any claim to be a world-wide lingua franca.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1942 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Review of The Sword and the Sickle by Mulk Raj Anand, Horizon (July 1942)
“Everyone believes in the atrocities of the enemy and disbelieves in those of his own side, without ever bothering to examine the evidence.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1942 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Looking Back on the Spanish War" (Autumn 1942)
“You and I both know that there can be no real solution of the Indian problem which does not also benefit Britain. Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does. It is so obvious, is it not, that the British worker as well as the Indian peasant stands to gain by the ending of capitalist exploitation, and that Indian independence is a lost cause if the Fascist nations are allowed to dominate the world.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1943 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: From a review of Letters on India by Mulk Raj Anand, Tribune (19 March 1943)
“It was thinking of people like him [William Empson] that made me rather angry about what you said of the BBC, though God knows I have the best means of judging what a mixture of whoreshop and lunatic asylum it is for the most part.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1943 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Alex Comfort (11? July 1943)
“Both men were the spiritual children of Voltaire, both had an ironical, sceptical view of life, and a native pessimism overlaid by gaiety; both knew that the existing social order is a swindle and its cherished beliefs mostly delusions.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1943 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: On Mark Twain and Anatole France, in "Mark Twain - The Licensed Jester" in Tribune (26 November 1943); reprinted in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (1968)
“Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1943 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Can Socialists Be Happy?", Tribune (20 December 1943). Published under the name ‘John Freeman’.
“The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood. This is widely felt to be the case, though it is not usually said, or not said loudly enough. Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1943 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Can Socialists Be Happy?", Tribune (20 December 1943).