George Orwell quotes - page 20

The existence of good bad literature the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration. (George Orwell)
And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs--and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety. View quote
George Orwell
History is written by the winners. View quote
George Orwell
They fear love because it creates a world they can't control. View quote
George Orwell
Before, he had fought against the money code, and yet he had clung to his wretched remnant of decency. But now it was precisely from decency that he wanted to escape. He wanted to go down, deep down, into some world where decency no longer mattered; to cut the strings of his self-respect, to submerge himself-to sink, as Rosemary had said. It was all bound up in his mind with the thought of being under ground. View quote
George Orwell
The thing that I think very striking is that no one, or no one I can remember, ever writes of an execution with approval. View quote
George Orwell
[A] world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area does sometimes make me wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony bin made use of by some other planet. View quote
George Orwell
We have a hunger for something like authenticity, but are easily satisfied by an ersatz facsimile. View quote
George Orwell
It's not a matter of whether the war is not real, or if it is, Victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous. Hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. This new version is the past and no different past can ever have existed. In principle the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects and its object is not the victory over either Eurasia or East Asia but to keep the very structure of society intact. View quote
George Orwell
The important thing is to discover which individuals are honest and which are not, and the usual blanket accusation merely makes this more difficult. View quote
George Orwell
Inequality was the price of civilization. (George Orwell)
All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia. View quote
George Orwell
At normal times it is deeply dishonest. All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news. View quote
George Orwell
The distinguishing mark of man is the, the instrument with which he does all his mischief. View quote
George Orwell
To the past, or to the future. To an age when thought is free. From the Age of Big Brother, from the Age of the Thought Police, from a dead man - greetings! View quote
George Orwell
There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad. View quote
George Orwell
It is almost impossible to think without talking. View quote
George Orwell
The much-publicized disunity on the Government side was not a main cause of defeat. View quote
George Orwell
Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals. View quote
George Orwell
At present I do not feel I have seen more than the fringe of poverty. Still, I can point to one or two things I have definitely learned by being hard up. I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy, nor subscribe to the Salvation Army, nor pawn my clothes, nor refuse a handbill, nor enjoy a meal at a smart restaurant. That is a beginning. View quote
George Orwell
This business of making people conscious of what is happening outside their own small circle is one of the major problems of our time, and a new literary technique will have to be evolved to meet it. (George Orwell)
What now strikes us as remarkable about the new moneyed class of the nineteenth century is their complete irresponsibility; they see everything in terms of individual success, with hardly any consciousness that the community exists. View quote
George Orwell
In every country in the world a huge tribe of party-hacks and sleek little professors are busy 'proving' that Socialism means no more than a planned state-capitalism with the grab-motive left intact. But fortunately there also exists a vision of Socialism quite different from this. The thing that attracts ordinary men to Socialism and makes them willing to risk their skins for it, the 'mystique' of Socialism, is the idea of equality; to the vast majority of people Socialism means a classless society, or it means nothing at all. View quote
George Orwell
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. It seems to me nonsense, in a period like our own, to think that one can avoid writing of such subjects. View quote
George Orwell
This thought cheered Bozo, I do not know why. He was a very exceptional man. View quote
George Orwell