Quotes from George Orwell

I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.

I have known numbers of bourgeois Socialists, I have listened by the hour to their tirades against their own class, and yet never, not even once, have I met one who had picked up proletarian table-manners.

On a ruinous wall I came upon a poster dating from the previous year and announcing that 'six handsome bulls' would be killed in the arena on such and such a date. How forlorn its faded colours looked. Where were the handsome bulls and the handsome bull-fighters now? It appeared that even in Barcelona there were hardly any bullfights nowadays - for some reason all the best matadors were Fascists.

I would sooner be a foreigner in Spain than in most countries. How easy it is to make friends in Spain!

Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible.

I said. 'It seems to me that when you take a man's money away he's fit for nothing from that moment.' 'No, not necessarily. If you set yourself to it, you can live the same life, rich or poor. You can still keep on with your books and your ideas. You just got to say to yourself, 'I'm a free man in HERE''—he tapped his forehead—'and you're all right.

The one certain thing was that death never came at an expected moment.

Do you know why you're here? Shall I tell you why we brought you here? To cure you.To make you sane.

If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say of this or that event, it never happened —that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death?...But where did that knowledge exist? Only in his consciousness, which in any case must soon be annihilated...'Who controls the past,' ran the Party slogan,'controls the future:who controls the present controls the past.'...All that was needed was a series of victories over your own memory.

You're dishonoured, somehow. You've sinned. Sinned against the aspidistra. You talk a great deal about aspidistras, said Ravelston. They're a dashed important subject, said Gordon.

To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals.

He was safe, everything was all right. He fell asleep murmuring Sanity is not statistical, with the feeling that this remark contained in it a profound wisdom.

The result of preaching totalitarian doctrines is to weaken the instinct by means of which free peoples know what is or is not dangerous.

What people always demand of a popular novelist is that he shall write the same book over and over again, forgetting that a man who would write the same book twice could not even write it once. Any writer who is not utterly lifeless moves upon a kind of parabola, and the downward curve is implied in the upward one.

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. . . . The food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.

Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties

I do hope you'll forgive me if I overwhelm you with talk. When I meet somebody who's heard that books exist, I'm afraid I go off like a bottle of warm beer.

You always, I notice, feel the same when you are under heavy fire - not so much afraid of being hit as afraid because you don't know where you will be hit. You are wondering all the while just where the bullet will nip you, and it gives your whole body a most unpleasant sensitiveness.

The tendency of mechanical progress is to make your environment safe and soft; and yet you are striving to keep yourself brave and hard...So in the last analysis the champion of progress is also the champion of anachronisms.

If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.

The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary. Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban.

Why should one feel it to be intolerable unless one had some kind of ancestral memory that things had one been different?

And it's a wonderful thing to be a boy, to go roaming where grown-ups can't catch you, and to chase rats and kill birds and shy stones and cheek carters and shout dirty words. It's a kind of a strong, rank feeling, a feeling of knowing everything and fearing nothing, and it's all bound up with breaking rules and killing things.