Quotes from George Orwell

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.

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

Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and for democratic Socialism as I understand it.

The main motive for nonattachment is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.

All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers.

... what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be told truthfully.

Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

It was soon noticed that when ever there was work to be done the cat could never be found.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes a revolution in order to establish a dictatorship.

Several of them would have protested if they could have found the right arguments.

The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.

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.

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

At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.

People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.

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

The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system.

[You write out of the] desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, etc., etc., etc. It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive and a strong one.

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.

If human equality is to be forever averted -- if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently -- then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.

The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think worth describing in detail.

In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.