Quotes from George Orwell

And even when they become discontented, as they sometimes did, their discontent led nowhere, because, being without general ideas, they could only focus it on petty specific grievances. The larger evils invariably escaped their notice.

The idea that you can somehow remain aloof from and superior to the struggle [World War II], while living on food which British sailors have to risk their lives to bring you, is a bourgeois illusion bred of money and security.

It is this fear of a supposedly dangerous mob that makes nearly all intelligent people conservative in their opinions.

A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field.

Spring, spring! Bytuene Mershe ant Averil, when spray biginneth to spring! When shaws be sheene and swards full fayre, and leaves both large and longe! When the hounds of spring are on winter's traces, in the spring time, the only pretty ring time, when the birds do sing, hey-ding-a-ding ding, cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-wee, ta-witta-woo! And so on and so on and so on. See almost any poet between the Bronze Age and 1805.

Good prose is like a windowpane.

It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters.

It was like struggling with some crushing physical task, something which one had the right to refuse and which one was nevertheless neurotically anxious to accomplish.

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.

El hombre es el único ser que consume sin producir. No da leche, no pone huevos, es demasiado débil para tirar del arado y su velocidad ni siquiera le permite atrapar conejos. Sin embargo, es dueño y señor de todos los animales

The point is that as soon as fear, hatred, jealousy and power worship are involved, the sense of reality becomes unhinged

You can only rule over a subject race, especially when you are in a small minority, if you honestly believe yourself to be racially superior, and it helps towards this if you can believe that the subject race is biologically different.

La double pensée est le pouvoir de garder à l'esprit simultanément deux croyances contradictoires, et de les accepter toutes deux.

The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

There exists a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves.

They were one of those depressing families, so common among the middle-middle class, in which nothing ever happens

Much better hang wrong fellow than no fellow.

It was curious how that predestined horror moved in and out of one's consciousness. There it lay, fixed in future times, preceding death as surely as 99 precedes 100. One could not avoid it, but one could perhaps postpone it: and yet instead, every now and again, by a conscious, wilful act, one chose to shorten the interval before it happened.

I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone corrupt to the bones.' 'Well then, I ought to suit you, dear. I'm corrupt to the bones.

Football] 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.

The cost of reading, even if you buy books instead of borrowing them and take in a fairly large number of periodicals, does not amount to more than the combined cost of smoking and drinking.

It struck him as curious that you could create dead men but not living ones.

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.

His mother's memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, when he was too young and selfish to love her in return