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George Orwell

344 quotes

“Money is the one thing you must never mention when you are with people richer than yourself. Or if you do, then it must be money in the abstract, money with a big 'M', not the actual concrete money that's in your pocket and isn't in mine.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“After all, it's only what Marx said. Every ideology is a reflection of economic circumstances.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Poverty is spiritual halitosis.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Hermione always yawned at the mention of Socialism, and refused even to read Antichrist. 'Don't talk to me about the lower classes,' she used to say. 'I hate them. They smell.' And Ravelston adored her.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“What rot it is to talk about Socialism or any other ism when women are what they are! The only thing a woman ever wants is money; money for a house of her own and two babies and Drage furniture and an aspidistra. The only sin they can imagine is not wanting to grab money. No woman ever judges a man by anything except his income. Of course she doesn't put it to herself like that. She says he's such a nice man - meaning that he's got plenty of money. And if you haven't got money you aren't nice. You're dishonoured, somehow. You've sinned. Sinned against the aspidistra.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Marriage is only a trap set for you by the money-god. You grab the bait; snap goes the trap; and there you are, chained by the leg to some 'good' job till they cart you to Kensal Green. And what a life! Licit sexual intercourse in the shade of the aspidistra. Pram-pushing and sneaky adulteries. And the wife finding you out and breaking the cut-glass whisky decanter over your head.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Without money, you can't be straightforward in your dealings with women. For without money, you can't pick and choose, you've got to take what women you can get; and then, necessarily, you've got to break free of them. Constancy, like all other virtues, has got to be paid for in money.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why is it that one can't borrow from a rich friend and can from a half-starved relative?”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“He would only drift and sink, drift and sink, like the others of his family; but worse than them - down, down into some dreadful sub-world that as yet he could only dimly imagine. It was what he had chosen when he declared war on money. Serve the money-god or go under; there is no other rule.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“She looked at him helplessly. After all, it was no use. There was this money-business standing in the way - these meaningless scruples which she had never understood but which she had accepted merely because they were his. She felt all the impotence, the resentment of a woman who sees an abstract idea triumphing over common sense.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Their friendship was at an end, it seemed to him. The evil time when he had lived on Ravelston had spoiled everything. Charity kills friendship.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One's got to change the system, or one changes nothing.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Americans always go one better on any kind of beastliness, whether it is ice-cream soda, racketeering or theosophy.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Chiefly I remember the horsy smells, the quavering bugle-calls (all our buglers were amateurs – I first learned the Spanish bugle-calls by listening to them outside the Fascist lines), the tramp-tramp of hobnailed boots in the barrack yard, the long morning parades in the wintry sunshine, the wild games of football, fifty a side, in the gravelled riding-school.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle ... There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Human beings were behaving as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[G]oodness knows how many times the Spanish standard of marksmanship has saved my life.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Everyone always did miss everyone else in this war, whenever it was humanly possible to do so.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“All Spaniards, we discovered, knew two English expressions. One was "O.K., baby", the other was a word used by the Barcelona whores in their dealings with English sailors, and I am afraid the compositors would not print it.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The only unexpected feature in the Spanish situation – and outside Spain it has caused an immense amount of misunderstanding – is that among the parties on the Government side the Communists stood not upon the extreme Left, but upon the extreme Right.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[F]inally, a year after the outbreak of war and revolution, there remained a Government composed entirely of Right-wing Socialists, Liberals, and Communists.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In reality it was the Communists above all others who prevented revolution in Spain.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The Communists had gained power and a vast increase of membership partly by appealing to the middle classes against the revolutionaries, but partly also because they were the only people who looked capable of winning the war.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Elsewhere in Spain no formal unification between Socialists and Communists had taken place, but the Communist viewpoint and the Right-wing Socialist viewpoint could everywhere be regarded as identical.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours. Sometimes it is a comfort to me to think that the aeroplane is altering the conditions of war. Perhaps when the next great war comes we may see that sight unprecedented in all history, a jingo with a bullet-hole in him.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In stationary warfare there are three things that all soldiers long for: a battle, more cigarettes, and a week's leave.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I think the pacifists might find it helpful to illustrate their pamphlets with enlarged photographs of lice. Glory of war, indeed!”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“By one of those strokes of luck that happen about once in a year I had managed to drop the bomb almost exactly where the rifle had flashed. There was the roar of the explosion and then, instantly, a diabolical outcry of screams and groans. We had got one of them, anyway; I don't know whether he was killed, but certainly he was badly hurt. Poor wretch, poor wretch! I felt a vague sorrow as I heard him screaming.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The workers' militias, based on the trade unions and each composed of people of approximately the same political opinions, had the effect of canalizing into one place all the most revolutionary sentiment in the country. I had dropped more or less by chance into the only community of any size in Western Europe where political consciousness and disbelief in capitalism were more normal than their opposites.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“In every country in the world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy 'proving' that Socialism means no more than a planned state—capitalism with the grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there also exists a vision of Socialism quite different from this. The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the 'mystique' of Socialism, is the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have no particular love for the idealised "worker" as he appears in the bourgeois Communist's mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The fat Russian agent was cornering all the foreign refugees in turn and explaining plausibly that this whole affair was an Anarchist plot. I watched him with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies — unless one counts journalists.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“An immense amount, enough to fill many books, has already been written on the subject [of the Barcelona fighting], and I do not suppose I should exaggerate if I said that nine-tenths of it is untruthful.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No one I met at this time — doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients — failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It was queer how the general spirit seemed to change when you got anywhere near the front line. All or nearly all of the vicious hatred of the political parties evaporated.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It seemed queer, in the barber's shop, to see the Anarchist notice still on the wall, explaining that tips were prohibited. "The Revolution has struck off our chains," the notice said. I felt like telling the barbers that their chains would soon be back on again if they didn't look out.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have the most evil memories of Spain, but I have very few bad memories of Spaniards.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I am a writer. The impulse of every writer is to "keep out of politics". What he wants is to be left alone so that he can go on writing books in peace. But unfortunately it is becoming obvious that this ideal is no more practicable than that of the petty shop-keeper who hopes to preserve his independence in the teeth of the chain-stores.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it. For perhaps ten years past I have had some grasp of the real nature of capitalist society. I have seen British imperialism at work in Burma, and I have seen something of the effects of poverty and unemployment in Britain. In so far as I have struggled against the system, it has been mainly by writing books which I hoped would influence the reading public. I shall continue to do that, of course, but at a moment like the present writing books is not enough.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Why the ILP more than another? Because the ILP is the only British party — at any rate the only one large enough to be worth considering — which aims at anything I should regard as Socialism. I do not mean that I have lost all faith in the Labour Party. My most earnest hope is that the Labour Party will win a clear majority in the next General Election.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1939 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Charles Dickens" (1939), Inside the Whale and Other Essays (1940)
“The great disadvantage, and advantage, of the small urban bourgeois is his limited outlook. He sees the world as a middle-class world, and everything outside, these limits is either laughable or slightly wicked.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The outstanding, unmistakable mark of Dickens's writing is the unnecessary detail.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If Dickens were alive to-day he would make a trip to Soviet Russia and come back with a book rather like Gide's Retour de L'URSS.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are ‘only doing their duty’, as the saying goes. Most of them, I have no doubt, are kind-hearted law-abiding men who would never dream of committing murder in private life.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“One cannot see the modern world as it is unless one recognizes the overwhelming strength of patriotism, national loyalty. In certain circumstances it can break down, at certain levels of civilization it does not exist, but as a positive force there is nothing to set beside it. Christianity and international Socialism are as weak as straw in comparison with it. Hitler and Mussolini rose to power in their own countries very largely because they could grasp this fact and their opponents could not.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Also, one must admit that the divisions between nation and nation are founded on real differences of outlook. Till recently it was thought proper to pretend that all human beings are very much alike, but in fact anyone able to use his eyes knows that the average of human behaviour differs enormously from country to country. Things that could happen in one country could not happen in another.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Yes, there is something distinctive and recognisable in English civilisation. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source