Quotes from George Orwell

Even a single taboo can have an all-round crippling effect upon the mind, because there is always the danger that any thought which is freely followed up may lead to the forbidden thought.

Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and æsthetically disgusting. It is better to start by admitting that, and then to try to find out why it is that he survives while the refined people who have sniggered at him seem to wear so badly.

Unfortunately it is nowadays the fashion to pretend that the glass is penetrable. Of course everyone knows that class-prejudice exists, but at the same time everyone claims that he, in some mysterious way, is exempt from it. Snobbishness is one of those vices which we can discern in everyone else but never in ourselves.

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves Combing the white hair of the waves blown back When the wind blows the water white and black.

Well, Hilda and I were married, and right from the start it was a flop. Why did you marry her? you say. But why did you marry yours? These things happen to us. I wonder whether you'll believe that during the first two or three years I had serious thoughts of killing Hilda. Of course in practice one never does these things, they're only a kind of fantasy that one enjoys thinking about. Besides, chaps who murder their wives always get copped.

I mean that almost nobody seems to feel that an opponent deserves a fair hearing or that the objective truth matters so long as you can score a neat debating point.

Power is power over human beings, above all over the mind. Power over matter, external reality as you would call it, is not important. We control matter because we control the mind, Reality is inside the skull.

Orthodoxy, of whatever color, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.

It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building of any size had been seized by the workers and was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchists; every wall was scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties; almost every church had been gutted and its images burnt.

But he was sometimes willing to sacrifice financial profit to scholastic prestige. Occasionally, by special arrangement, he would take at greatly reduced fees some boy who seemed likely to win scholarships and thus bring credit on the school. It was on these terms that I was at Crossgates myself: otherwise my parents could not have afforded to send me to so expensive a school.

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Money, money, all is money! Could you write even a penny novelette without money to put heart into you? Invention, energy, wit, style, charm--they've all got to be paid for in hard cash.

Eight hundred people, possibly, are murdered every year in Burma, they matter nothing; but the murder of a white man is a monstrosity, a sacrilege.

a bookshop is one of the few places where you can hang about for a long time without spending any money.

Parecía, de alguna manera, que la finca se había enriquecido sin hacer más ricos a los propios animales... excepto, claro está, a los cerdos y a los perros.

Poverty is poverty, whether the tool you work with is a pick-axe or fountain pen.

Gordon wished he would come in. Sell him a copy of Women in Love. How it would disappoint him! But no! The Welsh solicitor had funked it. He tucked his umbrella under his arm and moved off with righteously turned backside. But doubtless tonight, when darkness hid his blushes, he'd slink into one of the rubber–shops and buy High Jinks in a Parisian Convent, by Sadie Blackeyes. Gordon turned away from the door and back to the book–shelves.

The word Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies "something not desirable." The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice, have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.

Freedom is freedom to say that two plus two is four

The pigs did not actually work, but directed and supervised the others.

Nationalism is power-hunger tempered by self-deception.

Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictator-ship.

Gambling, beer and football filled the horizons of their minds.

It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable, the wrongness of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. [...] He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone – one mind less, one world less.