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George Orwell

344 quotes

• “From Carlyle onwards, but especially in the last generation, the British intelligentsia have tended to take their ideas from Europe and have been infected by habits of thought that derive ultimately from Machiavelli. All the cults that have been fashionable in the last dozen years, Communism, Fascism, and pacifism, are in the last analysis forms of power worship.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The English People" (written Spring 1944, published 1947)

• “Mr Noyes remarks at the beginning of his book that one cannot cast out devils with the aid of Beelzebub, but he is also extremely angry because anti-British books can still be published in England and praised in British newspapers. Does it not occur to him that if we stop doing this kind of thing the main difference between ourselves and our enemies would have disappeared?”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Observer, 27 February 1944

• “Between them these two books sum up our present predicament. Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets, and war. Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war. There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect, which can only happen if the concept of right and wrong is restored to politics.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Review of The Road to Serfdom by F.A. Hayek and The Mirror of the Past by K. Zilliacus, reviewed in The Observer (9 April 1944).

• “Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1943 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to H. J. Willmett (18 May 1944), published in The Collected Essays, Journalism, & Letters, George Orwell: As I Please, 1943-1945 (2000), edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus

• “Of course, fanatical Communists and Russophiles generally can be respected, even if they are mistaken. But for people like ourselves, who suspect that something has gone very wrong with the Soviet Union, I consider that willingness to criticize Russia and Stalin is the test of intellectual honesty. It is the only thing that from a literary intellectual's point of view is really dangerous.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1943 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to John Middleton Murry (5 August 1944), published in The Collected Essays, Journalism, & Letters, George Orwell: As I Please, 1943-1945 (2000), edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus

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

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to Frank Barber (15 December 1944)

• “Particularly on the Left, political thought is a sort of masturbation fantasy in which the world of facts hardly matters.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: London Letter" in Partisan Review (Winter 1945)

• “Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Benefit Of Clergy: Some Notes On Salvador Dalí," Dickens, Dali & Others: Studies in Popular Culture (1944)

• “So far as I can see, all political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: London Letter" (December 1944), in Partisan Review (Winter 1945)

• “It is fashionable to say that all the causes we fought for have been defeated, but this seems to me a gross exaggeration. The fact that after six years of war we can hold a General Election in a quite orderly way, and throw out a Prime Minister who has enjoyed almost dictatorial powers, shows that we have gained something by not losing the war.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: London Letter to Partisan Review (15 ? August 1945)

• “At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is 'not done' to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was 'not done' to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Freedom of the Press", unused preface to Animal Farm (1945), published in Times Literary Supplement (15 September 1972)

• “Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows, and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: You and the Atom Bomb", Tribune (19 October 1945)

• “Scientific education for the masses will do little good, and probably a lot of harm, if it simply boils down to more physics, more chemistry, more biology, etc to the detriment of literature and history. Its probable effect on the average human being would be to narrow the range of his thoughts and make him more than ever contemptuous of such knowledge as he did not possess.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: What is Science?", Tribune (26 October 1945)

• “The whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish day-dream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Revenge is Sour", Tribune (9 November 1945)

• “Actually there is little acute hatred of Germany left in this country, and even less, I should expect to find, in the army of occupation. Only the minority of sadists, who must have their "atrocities" from one source or another, take a keen interest in the hunting-down of war criminals and quislings.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Revenge is Sour", Tribune (9 November 1945)

• “The relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion. The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Freedom of the Park", Tribune (7 December 1945)

• “Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Sporting Spirit", Tribune (14 December 1945)

• “It is just thinkable that books may some day be written by machinery....”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Review of A Coat of Many Colours: Occasional Essays by Herbert Read, Poetry Quarterly (Winter 1945)

• “Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. This is an illusion, and one should recognise it as such, but one ought also to stick to one's own world-view, even at the price of seeming old-fashioned: for that world-view springs out of experiences that the younger generation has not had, and to abandon it is to kill one's intellectual roots.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Review of A Coat of Many Colours: Occasional Essays by Herbert Read, Poetry Quarterly (Winter 1945)

• “...but in his origins he is a Yorkshireman—that is, a member of a small, rustic, rather uncouth tribe whose members secretly believe all the other peoples of the earth to be just a little inferior to themselves. I think his best work comes from the Yorkshire strain in him.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Review of A Coat of Many Colours: Occasional Essays by Herbert Read, Poetry Quarterly (Winter 1945)

• “Out of this concourse of several hundred people, perhaps half of whom were directly connected with the writing trade, there was not a single one who could point out that freedom of the press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticise and oppose.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Prevention of Literature. Polemic, No. 2 (January 1946)

• “Totalitarianism demands, in fact, the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Prevention of Literature. Polemic, No. 2 (January 1946)

• “It would probably not be beyond human ingenuity to write books by machinery.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: The Prevention of Literature. Polemic, No. 2 (January 1946)

• “Decline of the English Murder”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Essay title, Tribune (15 February 1946)

• “In nearly seventy pages, it is astonishing how little he says, and how impressively he says it.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Review. The Cosmological Eye by Henry Miller. Tribune (22 February 1946)

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

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Second Thoughts on James Burnham". Polemic, (May 1946)

• “The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Why I Write," Gangrel (Summer 1946)

• “The Spanish war and other events in 1936-37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. 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.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Why I Write," Gangrel (Summer 1946)

• “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Why I Write," Gangrel (Summer 1946)

• “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.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels" (1946)

• “In my opinion, nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated. And so for the last ten years, I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the socialist movement.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1943 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm, as published in The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell: As I please, 1943-1945 (1968)

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

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1948 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Letter to Malcolm Muggeridge (4 December 1948), quoted in Malcolm Muggeridge: A Life (1980) by Ian Hunter

• “If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Original (unused) preface to Animal Farm (1945); as published in George Orwell: Some Materials for a Bibliography (1953) by Ian R. Willison

• “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Original preface to Animal Farm; as published in George Orwell: Some Materials for a Bibliography (1953) by Ian R. Willison

• “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.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: In Front of Your Nose", Tribune (22 March 1946)

• “To see what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: In Front of Your Nose," Tribune (22 March 1946)

• “Certainly we ought to be discontented, we ought not simply to find out ways of making the best of a bad job, and yet if we kill all pleasure in the actual process of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves? If a man cannot enjoy the return of spring, why should he be happy in a labour-saving Utopia? What will he do with the leisure that the machine will give him?”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Some Thoughts on the Common Toad", Tribune (12 April 1946)

• “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.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Some Thoughts on the Common Toad," Tribune (12 April 1946, page 10, last paragraph)

• “It was only after the Soviet régime became unmistakably totalitarian that English intellectuals, in large numbers, began to show an interest in it. Burnham, although the English russophile intelligentsia would repudiate him, is really voicing their secret wish: the wish to destroy the old, equalitarian version of Socialism and usher in a hierarchical society where the intellectual can at last get his hands on the whip.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Second Thoughts on James Burnham," Polemic (summer 1946)

• “In a Society in which there is no law, and in theory no compulsion, the only arbiter of behaviour is public opinion. But public opinion, because of the tremendous urge to conformity in gregarious animals, is less tolerant than any system of law. When human beings are governed by "thou shalt not", the individual can practise a certain amount of eccentricity: when they are supposedly governed by "love" or "reason", he is under continuous pressure to make him behave and think in exactly the same way as everyone else.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels," Polemic (September/October 1946) - Full text online

• “People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has man invented that even approaches in cruelty to some of the commoner diseases? "Natural" death, almost by definition, means something slow, smelly and painful.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: How the Poor Die", Now (November 1946)

• “The thing that politicians are seemingly unable to understand is that you cannot produce a vigorous literature by terrorising everyone into conformity.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1947 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: As I Please. Tribune (3 January 1947)

• “In The Managerial Revolution, Burnham foretold the rise of three super-states which would be unable to conquer one another and would divide the world between them.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1947 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Burnham's View of the Contemporary World Struggle. New Leader (New York) (29 March 1947)

• “In reality there is no kind of evidence or argument by which one can show that Shakespeare, or any other writer, is ‘good’. Nor is there any way of definitely proving that — for instance — Warwick Beeping is ‘bad’. Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion. Artistic theories such as Tolstoy's are quite worthless, because they not only start out with arbitrary assumptions, but depend on vague terms (‘sincere’, ‘important’ and so forth) which can be interpreted in any way one chooses.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1947 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool," Polemic (March 1947) - Full text online

• “A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1947 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool," Polemic (March 1947)

• “No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1947 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Such, Such Were The Joys" (May 1947); published in Partisan Review (September/October 1952)

• “Football, it seemed to me, is not really played for the pleasure of kicking the ball about, but is a species of fighting.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1947 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Such, Such Were The Joys" (May 1947); published in Partisan Review (September/October 1952)

• “Therefore there is always the danger that the United States will break up any European coalition by drawing Britain out of it.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1947 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Towards European Unity. Partisan Review (July/August 1947)

• “The state will cease to govern and will survive merely as an agency for the distribution of necessary commodities. All disagreeable jobs will be done by machinery, and everyone will be completely free to choose his own work and his own manner of life. In effect, the world will be populated by artists, each striving after perfection in the way that seems best to him.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1948 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Review. The Soul of Man under Socialism by Oscar Wilde. Observer, 9 May 1948

• “Actually, the problem for the world as a whole is not how to distribute such wealth that exists but how to increase production, without which economic equality merely means common misery.”

  George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1948 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source

  Recorded in: Review. The Soul of Man under Socialism by Oscar Wilde. Observer, 9 May 1948

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