George Orwell quotes - page 19

The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth. (George Orwell)
The ''Communism'' of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated. View quote
George Orwell
When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot? View quote
George Orwell
It was like swimming against a current that swept you backwards however hard you struggled, and then suddenly deciding to turn round and go with the current instead of opposing it. Nothing had changed except your own attitude: the predestined thing happened in any case. View quote
George Orwell
For the ordinary man is passive. Within a narrow circle (home life, and perhaps the trade unions or local politics) he feels himself master of his fate, but against major events he is as helpless as against the elements. So far from endeavoring to influence the future, he simply lies down and lets things happen to him. View quote
George Orwell
The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possiblity of independent thought. There are therefore two great problems which the Party is concerned to solve. One is how to discover against his will what another human being is thinking and the other is how to kill several hundred million people in a few seconds without giving warning beforehand. View quote
George Orwell
I'm fat, but I'm thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there's a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there's a statue inside every block of stone? View quote
George Orwell
Last of all came the cat, who looked round, as usual, for the warmest place, and finally squeezed herself in between Boxer and Clover; there she purred contentedly throughout Major's speech without listening to a word of what he was saying. View quote
George Orwell
Perhaps it is only when people are somewhere near the starvation level that they have anything to sing about. View quote
George Orwell
For, when you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outweighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry. View quote
George Orwell
Winston Churchill could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war. (George Orwell)
What was happening was only the working-out of a process that had started years ago. The first step had been a secret, involuntary thought, the second had been the opening of the diary. He had moved from thoughts to words, and now from words to actions. The last step was something that would happen in the Ministry of Love. He had accepted it. The end was contained in the beginning. View quote
George Orwell
Today there were fear, hatred, and pain, but no dignity of emotion, no deep or complex sorrows. View quote
George Orwell
It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another. View quote
George Orwell
His whole mind and body seemed to be afflicted with an unbearable sensitivity, a sort of transparency, which made every movement, every sound, every contact, every word that he had to speak or listen to, an agony. Even in sleep he could not altogether escape form her image. View quote
George Orwell
What is not hereditary cannot be permanent. View quote
George Orwell
All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. View quote
George Orwell
I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put if off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing. View quote
George Orwell
Clover was a stout motherly mare approaching middle life, who had never quite got her figure back after her fourth foal. View quote
George Orwell
Between pigs and human beings there was not and there need not be any clash of interest whatsoever. View quote
George Orwell
It is difficult for a statesman who still has a political future to reveal everything that he knows: and in a profession in which one is a baby at 50 and middle-aged at seventy-five, it is natural that anyone who has not actually been disgraced should feel that he still has a future. (George Orwell)
If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens. View quote
George Orwell
It had never occurred to him that the body of a woman of fifty, blown up to monstrous dimensions by childbearing, then hardened, roughened by work til it was coarse in the grain like an overripe turnip, could be beautiful. But is was so, and after all, he thought, why not? View quote
George Orwell
The weariness of the cell is the vigour of the organism. View quote
George Orwell
The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life. View quote
George Orwell