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George Orwell

344 quotes

“The gentleness of the English civilisation is perhaps its most marked characteristic. You notice it the instant you set foot on English soil. It is a land where the bus conductors are good-tempered and the policemen carry no revolvers.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A navy employs comparatively few people, and it is an external weapon which cannot affect home politics directly. Military dictatorships exist everywhere, but there is no such thing as a naval dictatorship. What English people of nearly all classes loathe from the bottom of their hearts is the swaggering officer type, the jingle of spurs, and the crash of boots.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“During the war of 1914-18 the English working class were in contact with foreigners to an extent that is rarely possible. The sole result was that they brought back a hatred of all Europeans, except the Germans, whose courage they admired. In four years on French soil they did not even acquire a liking for wine.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Thereupon the people picked a leader nearer to their mood, Churchill, who was at any rate able to grasp that wars are not won without fighting. Later, perhaps, they will pick another leader who can grasp that only Socialist nations can fight effectively.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly. But in any calculation about it one has got to take into account its emotional unity, the tendency of nearly all its inhabitants to feel alike and act together in moments of supreme crisis. It is the only great country in Europe that is not obliged to drive hundreds of thousands of its nationals into exile or the concentration camps.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Is the English press honest or dishonest? At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news. Yet I do not suppose there is one paper in England that can be straightforwardly bribed with hard cash. In the France of the Third Republic all but a very few of the newspapers could notoriously be bought over the counter like so many pounds of cheese.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The policeman who arrests the "Red" does not understand the theories the "Red" is preaching; if he did, his own position as bodyguard of the monied class might seem less pleasant to him.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The British ruling class were not altogether wrong in thinking that Fascism was on their side. It is a fact that any rich man, unless he is a Jew, has less to fear from Fascism than from either Communism or democratic Socialism. One ought never to forget this, for nearly the whole of German and Italian propaganda is designed to cover it up.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The middle-class families celebrated by Kipling, the prolific lowbrow families whose sons officered the army and navy and swarmed over all the waste places of the earth from the Yukon to the Irrawaddy, were dwindling before 1914. The thing that had killed them was the telegraph. In a narrowing world, more and more governed from Whitehall, there was every year less room for individual initiative.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality. In left-wing circles it is always felt that there is something slightly disgraceful in being an Englishman and that it is a duty to snigger at every English institution, from horse racing to suet puddings. It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during God save the King than of stealing from a poor box.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The lady in the Rolls-Royce car is more damaging to morale than a fleet of Göring’s bombing planes.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“War is the greatest of all agents of change. It speeds up all processes, wipes out minor distinctions, brings realities to the surface.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Having defeated your enemy you have to choose (unless you want another war within a generation) between exterminating him and treating him generously.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1943 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As I Please," Tribune, (24 December 1943)
“So far as it goes, the distinction, between an atrocity and an act of war is valid. An atrocity means an act of terrorism which has no genuine military purpose. One must accept such distinctions if one accepts war at all, which in practice everyone does. Nevertheless, a world in which it is wrong to murder an individual and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area does sometimes make me wonder whether this planet of hours is not a loony-bin made use of by some other planet.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1943 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As I Please," Tribune, (31 December 1943)
“Not to have a national anthem would be logical.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1943 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As I Please," Tribune (31 December 1943)
“Antisemitism, for instance, is simply not the doctrine of a grown-up person.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As I Please," Tribune (28 January 1944)
“A Nazi and a non-Nazi version of the present war would have no resemblance to one another, and which of them finally gets into the history books will be decided not by evidential methods but on the battlefield......In the last analysis our only claim to victory is that if we win the war we shall tell less lies about it than our adversaries. The really frightening thing about totalitarianism is not that it commits "atrocities" but that it attacks the concept of objective truth; it claims to control the past as well as the future.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As I Please," Tribune (4 February 1944)
“But it takes a war to make map-reading popular.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As I Please," Tribune (11 February 1944)
“If you talk to a thoughtful Christian, Catholic or Anglican, you often ﬁnd yourself laughed at for being so ignorant as to suppose that anyone ever took the doctrines of the Church literally.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Having lived in an oriental country I have developed a certain indifference to miracles, and I well know that having delusions, or even being an outright lunatic, is quite compatible with what is loosely called genius.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As I Please," Tribune (3 March 1944)
“[Man] is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As I Please," Tribune (3 March 1944)
“Let a politician die, and his worst enemies will stand up on the ﬂoor of the House and utter pious lies in his honour, but a writer or artist must be sniffed at, at least if he is any good.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“[E]ven stupidity is better than totalitarianism.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As I Please," Tribune (10 March 1944)
“It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-ﬁghting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“But Fascism is also a political and economic system. Why, then, cannot we have a clear and generally accepted definition of it? Alas! we shall not get one—not yet, anyway. To say why would take too long, but basically it is because it is impossible to define Fascism satisfactorily without making admissions which neither the Fascists themselves, nor the Conservatives, nor Socialists of any colour, are willing to make. All one can do for the moment is to use the word with a certain amount of circumspection and not, as is usually done, degrade it to the level of a swearword.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As I Please," Tribune (24 March 1944)
“The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside. Quite a number of people console themselves with this thought, now that totalitarianism in one form or another is visibly on the up-grade in every part of the world. Out in the street the loudspeakers bellow, the flags flutter from the rooftops, the police with their tommy-guns prowl to and fro, the face of the Leader, four feet wide, glares from every hoarding; but up in the attics the secret enemies of the regime can record their thoughts in perfect freedom—that is the idea, more or less.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As I Please," Tribune (28 April 1944)
“The greatest mistake is to imagine that the human being is an autonomous individual. The secret freedom which you can supposedly enjoy under a despotic government is nonsense, because your thoughts are never entirely your own. Philosophers, writers, artists, even scientists, not only need encouragement and an audience, they need constant stimulation from other people. It is almost impossible to think without talking. ... Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As I Please," Tribune (28 April 1944)
“One of the big failures in human history has been the agelong attempt to stop women painting their faces.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As I Please," Tribune (28 April 1944)
“In the nineteenth century some parts of the world were unexplored, but there was almost no restriction on travel. Up to 1914 you did not need a passport for any country except Russia. The European emigrant, if he could scrape together a few pounds for the passage, simply set sail for America or Australia, and when he got there no questions were asked. In the eighteenth century it had been quite normal and safe to travel in a country with which your own country was at war.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As I Please," Tribune (12 May 1944)
“A phrase much used in political circles in this country is "playing into the hands of". It is a sort of charm or incantation to silence uncomfortable truths. When you are told that by saying this, that or the other you are "playing into the hands of" some sinister enemy, you know that it is your duty to shut up immediately.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As I Please," Tribune (9 June 1944)
“Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As I Please," Tribune (7 July 1944)
“[T]he outcry against killing women, if you accept killing at all, is sheer sentimentality. Why is it worse to kill a woman than a man?”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As I Please," Tribune (14 July 1944)
“The whole question of evolution seems less momentous than it did, because, unlike the Victorians, we do not feel that to be descended from animals is degrading to human dignity.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As I Please," Tribune (21 July 1944)
“In any form of art designed to appeal to large numbers of people,...[t]he rich man is usually 'bad', and his machinations are invariably frustrated. 'Good poor man defeats bad rich man' is an accepted formula.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As I Please," Tribune (28 July 1944)
“War damages, the fabric of civilisation not by the destruction it causes (the net effect of a war may even be to increase the productive capacity of the world as a whole) nor even by the slaughter of human beings, but by the stimulated hatred and dishonesty.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As I Please," Tribune (4 August 1944)
“Anyone who knows of a provable instance of colour discrimination ought always to expose it.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As I Please," Tribune (11 August 1944)
“Stop to consider how the so-called owners of the land got hold of it. They simply seized it by force, afterwards hiring lawyers to provide them with title-deeds. In the case of the enclosure of the common lands, which was going on from about 1600 to 1850, the land-grabbers did not even have the excuse of being foreign conquerors; they were quite frankly taking the heritage of their own countrymen, upon no sort of pretext except that they had the power to do so.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“First of all, a message to English left-wing journalists and intellectuals generally: Do remember that dishonesty and cowardice always have to be paid for. Don't imagine that for years on end you can make yourself the boot-licking propagandist of the Soviet régime, or any other régime, and then suddenly return to mental decency. Once a whore, always a whore.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As I Please" column in The Tribune (1 September 1944)
“The thing that strikes me more and more—and it strikes a lot of other people, too—is the extraordinary viciousness and dishonesty of political controversy in our time. I don't mean merely that controversies are acrimonious. They ought to be that when they are on serious subjects. I mean that almost nobody seems to feel that an opponent deserves a fair hearing or that the objective truth matters as long as you can score a neat debating point.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As I Please," Tribune (8 December 1944)
“The important thing is to discover which individuals are honest and which are not, and the usual blanket accusation merely makes this more difficult. The atmosphere of hatred in which controversy is conducted blinds people to considerations of this kind. To admit that an opponent might be both honest and intelligent is felt to be intolerable. It is more immediately satisfying to shout that he is a fool or a scoundrel, or both, than to find out what he is really like. It is this habit of mind, among other things, that has made political prediction in our time so remarkably unsuccessful.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1944 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As I Please," Tribune (8 December 1944)
“Victor Raikes, the Tory M.P., who is an able and outspoken reactionary, made a speech which I should have considered a good one if it had referred only to Poland and Jugoslavia. But after dealing with those two countries he went on to speak about Greece, and then suddenly black became white, and white black. There was no booing, no interjections from the quite large audience—and none there, apparently, who could see that the forcing of quisling governments upon unwilling peoples is equally undesirable whoever does it.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is not a good symptom that hanging should still be the accepted form of capital punishment in this country. Hanging is a barbarous, inefficient way of killing anybody, and at least one fact about it—quite widely known, I believe—is so obscene as to be almost unprintable.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As I Please" column in The Tribune (15 November 1946)
“While the game of deadlocks and bottle-necks goes on, another more serious game is also being played. It is governed by two axioms. One is that there can be no peace without a general surrender of sovereignty: the other is that no country capable of defending its sovereignty ever surrenders it. If one keeps these axioms in mind one can generally see the relevant facts in international affairs through the smoke-screen with which the newspapers surround them.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1946 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As I Please," Tribune (13 December 1946)
“Since the decay of the belief in personal immortality, death has never seemed funny, and it will be a long time before it does so again. Hence the disappearance of the facetious epitaph, once a common feature of country churchyards. I should be astonished to see a comic epitaph dated later than 1850. There is one in Kew, if I remember rightly, which might be about that date. About half the tombstone is covered with a long panegyric on his dead wife by a bereaved husband: at the bottom of the stone is a later inscription which reads, ‘Now he’s gone, too’.'”
George Orwell (1903–1950) first seen 1947 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: As I Please (17 February 1947)
“We have become too civilized to grasp the obvious. For the truth is very simple. To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil. Those who take the sword perish by the sword, and those who don't take the sword perish by smelly diseases.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I have little direct evidence about the atrocities in the Spanish civil war. I know that some were committed by the Republicans, and far more (they are still continuing) by the Fascists. But what impressed me then, and has impressed me ever since, is that atrocities are believed in or disbelieved in solely on grounds of political predilection. 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) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The intelligentsia are the people who squeal loudest against fascism, and yet a respectable proportion of them collapse into defeatism when the pinch comes. They are far-sighted enough to see the odds against them, and moreover they can be bribed — for it is evident that the Nazis think it worth while to bribe intellectuals.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“When one thinks of the cruelty, squalor, and futility of war - and in this particular case of the intrigues, the persecutions, the lies and the misunderstandings - there is always the temptation to say: "One side is as bad as the other. I am neutral." In practice, however, one cannot be neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other more or less for reaction.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I believe that in the future we shall come to feel that Stalin's foreign policy, instead of being so diabolically clever as it is claimed to be, has been merely opportunistic and stupid.”
George Orwell (1903–1950) said by 1950 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source