Quotes from George Orwell

Journalism is printing something that someone does not want printed. Everything else is public relations.

Tell me, what did you think of me before that day I gave you that note?" He did not feel any temptation to tell lies to her. It was even a sort of love-offering to start off by telling the worst. "I hated the sight of you," he said. "I wanted to rape you and then murder you afterwards. Two weeks ago I thought seriously of smashing your head in with a cobble-stone.

Political chaos is connected with the decay of language... one can probably bring about some improvement by starting at the verbal end.

In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.

The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.

It is always the anvil that breaks the hammer, never the other way about.

Like the crocodile, he strikes always at the weakest spot.

I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me.

They can't get inside you,' she had said. But they could get inside you.

She knew when to cheer and when to boo, and that was all one needed

In certain kinds of writing, particularly in art criticism and literary criticism, it is normal to come across long passages which are almost completely lacking in meaning.

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?

All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.

Do it to Julia.

They were a bit shaken, and sometimes a little dispirited. But at least they never lived to know that everything they'd believed in was just so much junk. They lived at the end of an epoch, when everything was dissolving into a sort of ghastly flux, and they didn't know it. They thought it was eternity. You couldn't blame them. That was what it felt like.

It is devilish to suffer from a pain that is all but nameless. Blessed are they who are stricken only with classifiable diseases! Blessed are the poor, the sick, the crossed in love, for at least other people know what is the matter with them and will listen to their belly-achings with sympathy. But who that has not suffered it understands the pains of exile?

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end.

What is to be expected of them is not treachery, or physcial cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing.

Yet in the most mean, cowardly, hypocritical way the British ruling class did all they could to hand Spain over to Franco and the Nazis. Why? Because they were pro-Fascist, was the obvious answer.

One can be granted intellectual liberty when one has no intellect.

Poverty is spiritual halitosis.

political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.

We are the dead,' he said. 'We are the dead,' echoed Julia dutifully. 'You are the dead,' said an iron voice behind them.

Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds