Top 774 Quotes & Sayings by George Orwell - Page 5

I watched him [a 'fat Russian agent'] with some interest, for it was the first time that I had seen a person whose profession was telling lies -- unless one counts journalists.

If you kept the small rules, you could break the big ones.

Fate seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes.

You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves.

It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes: only in the mind of the Party, which is collective and immortal.

There are books that one reads over and over again, books that become part of the furniture of one's mind and alter one's whole attitude to life, books that one dips into but never reads through, books that one reads at a single sitting and forgets a week later.

If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion. In this country intellectual cowardice is the worst enemy a writer or journalist has to face, and that fact does not seem to me to have had the discussion it deserves.

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

If I had understood the situation a bit better I should probably have joined the Anarchists.

Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.

And in the general hardening of outlook that set in ... practices which had been long abandoned ... -- imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions, the use of hostages and the deportation of whole populations -- not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother

Men use up their lives in heart-breaking political struggles, or get themselves killed in civil wars, or tortured in the secret prisons of the Gestapo, not in order to establish some central-heated, air-conditioned, strip-lighted Paradise, but because they want a world in which human beings love one another instead of swindling and murdering one another.

By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself.

All the papers that matter live off their advertisements, and the advertisers exercise an indirect censorship over news.

Does Big Brother exist?" "Of course he exists. The Party exists. Big Brother is the embodiment of the Party." "Does he exist in the same way as I exist?" "You do not exist.

A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.

Rifles, muskets, long-bows and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon - so long as there is no answer to it - gives claws to the weak.

We are in a strange period of history in which a revolutionary has to be a patriot and a patriot has to be a revolutionary.

Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.

The more intelligent, the less sane

I always disagree, however, when people end up saying that we can only combat Communism, Fascism or what not if we develop an equal fanaticism. It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence.

A human being is primarily a bag for putting food into.

Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

Nearly all creators of Utopia have resembled the man who has toothache, and therefore thinks happiness consists in not having toothache. They wanted to produce a perfect society by an endless continuation of something that had only been valuable because it was temporary. The wider course would be to say that there are certain lines along which humanity must move, the grand strategy is mapped out, but detailed prophecy is not our business. Whoever tries to imagine perfection simply reveals his own emptiness.

To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.

The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a physical necessity.

You must be an intellectual. A normal person would never believe a thing like that.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.

If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.

The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background.

By ' patriotism ' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life , which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people.

Orthodoxy is the ability to say two and two make five when faith requires it.

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.

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

All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth.

If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.

Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.

All art is propaganda.

If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?

To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulne­ss while telling carefully constructe­d lies, to hold simultaneo­usly two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradict­ory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy.

The energy that actually shapes the world springs from emotions - racial pride, leader-worship, religious belief, love of war - which liberal intellectuals mechanically write off as anachronisms, and which they have usually destroyed so completely in themselves as to have lost all power of action.

If there is hope, it lies in the proles.

We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.

The fact is that every war suffers a kind of progressive degradation with every month that it continues, because such things as individual liberty and a truthful press are simply not compatible with military efficiency.

Confession is not betrayal. What you say or do doesn't matter; only feelings matter. If they could make me stop loving you-that would be the real betrayal.

This work was strictly voluntary, but any animal who absented himself from it would have his rations reduced by half.

No one is patriotic about taxes.

If you have no money, men won't care for you, women won't love you; won't, that is, care for you or love you the last little bit that matters.

What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked upon as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty becasue they have no intellect.

The words democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another.

[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. Not to have a national anthem would be logical.

To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.

It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same--everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another's existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same--people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.

To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.

A humanitarian is always a hypocrite.