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George Orwell

344 quotes

“Threats to freedom of speech, writing and action, though often trivial in isolation, are cumulative in their effect and, unless checked, lead to a general disrespect for the rights of the citizen.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Freedom Defence Committee" in "The Socialist Leader (18 September 1948); also in The Collected Essays, Journalism, & Letters, George Orwell; Vol. IV: In front of your nose, 1945-1950 (2000), p. 447
“I always disagree, however, when people end up saying that we can only combat Communism, Fascism or what not if we develop an equal fanaticism. It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1945 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Richard Rees (3 March 1949), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 4: In front of your nose, 1945-1950 (1968), ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, p. 478
“It is difficult for a statesman who still has a political future to reveal everything that he knows: and in a profession in which one is a baby at 50 and middle-aged at seventy-five, it is natural that anyone who has not actually been disgraced should feel that he still has a future.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1949 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Review of Their Finest Hour by Winston Churchill, New Leader (14 May 1949)
“One cannot really be Catholic & grown-up.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1949 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Extracts from a Manuscript Notebook" (1949), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4 (1968)
“At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1949 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Extracts from a Manuscript Notebook" (17 April 1949), The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4 (1968)
“I have always thought there might be a lot of cash in starting a new religion.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1920 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell, Volume 1: An Age Like This, 1920-1940 (1968), edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus Orwell, p. 304
“[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.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1949 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Sidney Sheldon, (Aug. 9, 1949) The Other Side of Me (Autobiography), Hachette Book Group USA, New York, NY, 2006, Chapter 20, p. 53. Sheldon purchased the stage rights to1984 from Orwell.
“What is needed is the right to print what one believes to be true, without having to fear bullying or blackmail from any side.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: 1946 exchange with Randall Swingler; quoted in Every Intellectual's Big Brother: George Orwell's Literary Siblings, John Rodden, University of Texas Press, Austin, p. 30
“The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people — people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from normal standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work. Some of the lodgers in our hotel lived lives that were curious beyond words.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am trying to describe the people in our quarter, not for the mere curiosity, but because they are all part of the story. Poverty is what I am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this slum. The slum, with its dirt and its queer lives, was first an object-lesson in poverty, and then the background of my own experiences. It is for that reason that I try to give some idea of what life was like there.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ah, the poverty, the shortness the disappointment of human joy! For in reality car en realite, what is the duration of the supreme moment of love? It is nothing, an instant, a second perhaps. A second of ecstasy, and after that- dust, ashes, nothingness.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though all one's blood had been pumped out and lukewarm water substituted.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One always abandons something in retreat. Look at Napoleon at the Beresina! He abandoned his whole army.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Fate seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I only realized during my last week that I was being cheated, and, as I could prove nothing, only twenty-five francs were refunded. The doorkeeper played similar tricks on any employee who was fool enough to be taken in. He called himself a Greek, but in reality he was an Armenian. After knowing him I saw the force of the proverb "Trust a snake before a Jew and a Jew before a Greek, but don't trust an Armenian.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it. ... Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants, because sound food is sacrificed to punctuality and smartness... The only food at the Hotel X which was ever prepared cleanly was the staff's.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“We crawled up to bed, tumbled down half dressed, and stayed there ten hours. Most of my Saturday nights went like this. On the whole, the two hours when one was perfectly and wildly happy seemed worth the subsequent headache. For many men in the quarter, unmarried and with no future to think of, the weekly drinking-bout was the one thing that made life worth living.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Looking round that filthy room, with raw meat lying among the refuse on the floor, and cold, clotted saucepans sprawling everywhere, and the sink blocked and coated with grease, I used to wonder whether there could be a restaurant in the world as bad as ours. But the other three all said they had been in dirtier places.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“How sweet the air does smell — even the air of a back-street in the suburbs — after the shut-in, subfaecal stench of the spike!”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He had two subjects of conversation, the shame and come-down of being a tramp, and the best way of getting a free meal.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Paddy and I had scarcely a wink of sleep, for there was a man near us who had some nervous trouble, shell-shock perhaps, which made him cry out 'Pip!' at irregular intervals. It was a loud, startling noise, something like the toot of a small motor-horn. You never knew when it was coming, and it was a sure preventer of sleep. ...he must have kept ten or twenty people awake every night. He was an example of the kind of thing that prevents one from ever getting enough sleep when men are herded as they are in these lodging houses.'”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The most bitter insult one can offer to a Londoner is "bastard" — which, taken for what it means, is hardly an insult at all.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ellis was one of those people who constantly nag others to echo their own opinions.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Living a lie the whole time — the lie that we're here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of to rob them ... it corrupts us, it corrupts us in ways you can't imagine.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Beauty is meaningless until it is shared.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I always think they're rather charming-looking, the Burmese. They have such splendid bodies! Just think what sights you'd see in England if people went about half naked as they do here!”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An earthquake is such fun when it is over.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Is there anything in the world more graceless, more dishonouring, than to desire a woman whom you will never have?”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Envy is a horrible thing. It is unlike all other kinds of suffering in that there is no disguising it, no elevating it into tragedy. It is more than merely painful, it is disgusting.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Money, once again; all is money. All human relationships must be purchased with money. If you have no money, men won't care for you, women won't love you; won't, that is, care for you or love you the last little bit that matters. And how right they are, after all! For, moneyless, you are unlovable. Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels. But then, if I haven't money, I DON'T speak with the tongues of men and of angels.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In a country like England you can no more be cultured without money than you can join the Cavalry Club.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That devastating omniscience! That noxious, horn-spectacled refinement! And the money that such refinement means! For after all, what is there behind it, except money? Money for the right kind of education, money for influential friends, money for leisure and peace of mind, money for trips to Italy. Money writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, O Lord, give me money, only money.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Of all types of human being, only the artist takes it upon himself to say that he 'cannot' work. But it is quite true; there ARE times when one cannot work. Money again, always money! Lack of money means discomfort, means squalid worries, means shortage of tobacco, means ever-present consciousness of failure - above all, it means loneliness. How can you be anything but lonely on two quid a week? And in loneliness no decent book was ever written.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No need to repeat the blasphemous comments which everyone who had known Gran'pa Comstock made on that last sentence. But it is worth pointing out that the chunk of granite on which it was inscribed weighed close on five tons and was quite certainly put there with the intention, though not the conscious intention, of making sure that Gran'pa Comstock shouldn't get up from underneath it. If you want to know what a dead man's relatives really think of him, a good rough test is the weight of his tombstone.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Gordon and his friends had quite an exciting time with their 'subversive ideas'. For a whole year they ran an unofficial monthly paper called the Bolshevik, duplicated with jellygraph. It advocated Socialism, free love, the dismemberment of the British Empire, the abolition of the Army and Navy, and so on and so forth. It was great fun. Every intelligent boy of sixteen is a Socialist. At that age one does not see the hook sticking out of the rather stodgy bait.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are two ways to live, he decided. You can be rich, or you can deliberately refuse to be rich. You can possess money, or you can despise money; the one fatal thing is to worship money and fail to get it.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Most of the employees were the hard-boiled, Americanized, go-getting type to whom nothing in the world is sacred, except money. They had their cynical code worked out. The public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket. And yet beneath their cynicism there was the final naivete, the blind worship of the money-god.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was queer. All over England young men were eating their hearts out for lack of jobs, and here was he, Gordon, to whom the very word 'job' was faintly nauseous, having jobs thrust unwanted upon him. It was an example of the fact that you can get anything in this world if you genuinely don't want it.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He had reached the age when the future ceases to be a rosy blur and becomes actual and menacing.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“That is the devilish thing about poverty, the ever-recurrent thing - loneliness. Day after day with never an intelligent person to talk to; night after night back to your godless room, always alone. Perhaps it sounds rather fun if you are rich and sought-after; but how different it is when you do it from necessity!”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When you have no money your life is one long series of snubs.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Gordon put his hand against the swing door. He even pushed it open a few inches. The warm fog of smoke and beer slipped through the crack. A familiar, reviving smell; nevertheless as he smelled it his nerve failed him. No! Impossible to go in. He turned away. He couldn't go shoving into that saloon bar with only fourpence halfpenny in his pocket. Never let other people buy your drinks for you! The first commandment of the moneyless. He made off down the dark pavement.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Social failure, artistic failure, sexual failure - they are all the same. And lack of money is at the bottom of them all.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No rich man ever succeeds in disguising himself as a poor man; for money, like murder, will out.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“This life we live nowadays! It's not life, it's stagnation, death-in-life. Look at all these bloody houses, and the meaningless people inside them! Sometimes I think we're all corpses. Just rotting upright.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source