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George Orwell Quotes

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Famous George Orwell Quotes

“[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.”

WorldDoeMadeSometimesUseWould BeEarthIndividualWonderPlanetsThousandAreasMurderLogicalCiviliansExplosivesAnthemNational Anthem
Book:The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell: As I please, 1943-1945
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“The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule , between good and evil but between two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world : that is evil; or you can overthrow them by war , which is also evil. There is no other choice before you, and whichever you choose you will not come out with clean hands.”

WorldHumansTwoWarHandsChoicesEvilHuman BeingsCleanGood And EvilYou ChooseNaziTwo EvilsClean Hands
Book:All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays
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“In the nineteenth century some parts of the world were unexplored, but there was almost no restriction on travel.:; Up to 1914 you did not need a passport for any country except Russia.:; The European emigrant, if he could scrape together a few pounds for the passage, simply set sail for America or Australia, and when he got there no questions were asked.:; In the eighteenth century it had been quite normal and safe to travel in a country with which your own country was at war.”

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Book:The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell: As I please, 1943-1945
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“By 'nationalism' I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions and tens of millions of people can be confidently labeled 'good' or 'bad'...By 'patriotism' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.”

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Author:George Orwell
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“As soon as you think of fishing you think of things that don't belong to the modern world. The very idea of sitting all day under a willow tree beside a quiet pool - and being able to find a quiet pool to sit beside- belongs to a time before the war, before radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler.”

ThinkingWorldIdeasWarAbleTreeSeaModernQuietSittingRiversFishesRadioBoatLakesFishingPoolModern WorldAeroplanesWillow Trees
Book:Coming Up for Air
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“Using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after. Once again, no book is genuinely free from political bias. The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.”

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Book:The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell: An age like this, 1920-1940
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“The only thing for which we can combine is the underlying ideal of Socialism; justice and liberty. But it is hardly strong enough to call this ideal underlying. It is almost completely forgotten. It has been buried beneath layer after layer of doctnaire priggishness, party squabbles and half-backed progressivism until it is like a diamond hidden under a monition of dung. The job of the Socialist is to get it out again. Justice and liberty! Those are the words that have got to ring like a bugle across the world.”

WorldHas BeensEnoughJobsStrongJusticePartyHalfLibertyIdealsForgottenRingsSocialismBuriedDiamondLayersSocialistStrong EnoughProgressivismSquabbles
Author:George Orwell
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“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.”

WorldWritingWarActionBeliefEnergyLostReligiousEmotionLeaderPrideShapesWorshipSpringDestroyedReligious BeliefAnachronism
Book:All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays
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“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.”

MenWorldWantHumansHeartWarUsePoliticalOrderHuman BeingsSecretStruggleAirPrisonCivil WarParadiseLove One AnotherHeart BreakingPolitical StruggleGestapoSwindling
Book:The Complete Works of George Orwell: I have tried to tell the truth, 1943-1944
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“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.”

PeopleThinkingWorldWellsHeartPoliticalLyingPoliticsExistenceMillionsSkyWallOne DayHatredIgnorantCuriousMusclesBelly
Book:Nineteen Eighty-Four
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“He examined the chess problem and set out the pieces. It was a tricky ending, involving a couple of knights. 'White to play and mate in two moves.' Winston looked up at the portrait of Big Brother. White always mates, he thought with a sort of cloudy mysticism. Always, without exception, it is so arranged. In no chess problem since the beginning of the world has black ever won. Did it not symbolize the eternal, unvarying triumph of Good over Evil? The huge face gazed back at him, full of calm power. White always mates.”

WorldTwoPlayProblemBigsFacesMovingEvilBlackWhitePiecesBrotherHugeCoupleEternalCalmChessTriumphExceptionMysticismMatesPortraitsKnightsTrickyInvolvingCloudyGood Over Evil
Book:1984
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“If he were allowed contact with foreigners he would discover that they are creatures similar to himself and that most of what he has been told about them is lies. The sealed world in which he lives would be broken, and the fear, hatred and self-righteousness on which his morale depends might evaporate.”

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Author:George Orwell
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“In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.”

PeopleWorldWayMadeBodyRealityLeftUnderstandingViewsPartyBehindsAcceptingEventsHappeningsBirdHarmSaneGrainIncapableCornViolationWorld ViewLack Of Understanding
Author:George Orwell
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“In the past the need for a hierarchal form of society has been the doctrine specifically of the High. It had been preached by kings and aristocrats and the priests, lawyers and the like who were parasitical upon them, and it had generally been softened by promises of an imaginary world beyond the grave.”

WorldNeedsHas BeensPastFormKingsPromiseLawyerGravesDoctrinePriestsImaginaryUtopiaUtopianFuturisticImaginary WorldIgnorance In 1984
Book:Animal Farm and 1984
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“When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases - bestial atrocities, iron heel, blood-stained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder - one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy, the appropriate noises are coming out of his larynx, but his brain is not involved”

WorldHumansKindFeelingsHuman BeingsBrainWatchesBloodInvolvedTiredShouldersTyrannyFamiliarNoiseCuriousPhrasesAppropriateIronComing OutPlatformsHeelsAtrocitiesHacksDummy
Author:George Orwell
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“I suppose there is no place in the world where snobbery is quite so ever-present or where it is cultivated in such refined and subtle forms as in an English public school. Here at least one cannot say that English ‘education’ fails to do its job. You forget your Latin and Greek within a few months of leaving school — I studied Greek for eight or ten years, and now, at thirty-three, I cannot even repeat the Greek alphabet — but your snobbishness, unless you persistently root it out like the bindweed it is, sticks by you till your grave.”

WorldYearsSchoolJobsFormThreeForgetFailingMonthsTenRootsSticksLeavingEightGravesGreekThirtyRepeatsSubtleLatinPublic SchoolRefinedPlaces In The WorldAlphabetSnobberySnobbishnessEnglish EducationLatin And GreekLeaving School
Book:The Complete Works of George Orwell: The road to Wigan Pier
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“Except for the small revolutionary groups which exist in all countries, the whole world was determined upon preventing revolution in Spain. In particular the Communist Party, with Soviet Russia behind it, had thrown its whole weight against the revolution. It was the Communist thesis that revolution at this stage would be fatal and that what was to be aimed at in Spain was not workers' control, but bourgeois democracy. It hardly needs pointing out why 'liberal' capitalist opinion took the same line.”

WorldNeedsCountryWholeWould BeLinesPartyBehindsOpinionDemocracyGroupsStageParticularRevolutionWeightWorkersDeterminedRussiaWhole WorldRevolutionaryThrownCommunistSovietCapitalistSpainPointingBourgeoisPreventingThesisSoviet RussiaCommunist Party
Book:Homage to Catalonia / Down and Out in Paris and London
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“The birds sang, the proles sang. the Party did not sing. All round the world, in London and New York, in Africa and Brazil, and in the mysterious, forbidden lands beyond the frontiers, in the streets of Paris and Berlin, in the villages of the endless Russian plain, in the bazaars of China and Japan — everywhere stood the same solid unconquerable figure, made monstrous by work and childbearing, toiling from birth to death and still singing.”

WorldMadeStillsPartyStreetsLandFiguresNew YorkBirthSingingBirdRoundsChinaLondonEndlessMysteriousParisJapanVillageForbiddenFrontiersBerlinMonstrousBrazilUnconquerableToilingChildbearingBazaarsChina And JapanStreets Of Paris
Book:1984
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“I had the lonely child's habit of making up stories and holding conversations with imaginary persons, and I think from the very start my literary ambitions were mixed up with the feeling of being isolated and undervalued. I knew that I had a facility with words and a power of facing unpleasant facts, and I felt that this created a sort of private world in which I could get my own back for my failure in everyday life.”

ThinkingWorldChildrenPersonsFactsStoriesFeelingsFeltMy OwnHabitConversationAmbitionLonelyEverydayIsolatedImaginaryEveryday LifeFacilityMaking UpUndervaluedLonely Child
Book:A Collection of Essays
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“Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery and torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain.”

WorldKindPainGrowsProgressStupidCreatingOppositesOur WorldTormentUtopiaTreacheryReformersHedonistic
Book:1984
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“The ideal set up by the Party was something huge, terrible, and glittering-a world of steel and concrete, of monstrous machines and terrifying weapons-a nation of warriors and fanatics, marching forward in perfect unity, all thinking the same thoughts and shouting the same slogans, perpetually working, fighting, triumphing, persecuting-three hundred million people all with the same face.”

PeopleThinkingWorldFacesFightingThreeNationsPerfectPartyMillionsHugeTerribleWeaponsHundredIdealsMachinesUnityWarriorConcreteSteelSlogansFanaticsMonstrousShouting1984 ImportantThinking The SameSame FaceMarching Forward
Book:1984
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“Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.”

WorldMayHas BeensWholeSlaverySlaveDecadesThriveEmpiresAnarchyStableBreakdownHeadingsAntiquityEpoch
Book:The Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell: In front of your nose, 1945-1950
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“The capitalists owned everything in the world, and everyone else was their slave. They owned all the land, all the houses, all the factories, and all the money. If anyone disobeyed them they could throw him into prison, or they could take his job away and starve him to death. When any ordinary person spoke to a capitalist he had to cringe and bow to him, and take off his cap and address him as 'Sir'”

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Book:Nineteen Eighty-Four
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“The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors. The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.”

WorldWayLongImportantCertainFatherViewsGroupsSonEssenceRemainsStructureTyrannyPersistenceTyrantsRulingInheritanceFather SonSuccessorsWorld ViewIgnorance In 1984
Author:George Orwell
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“The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.”

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Book:Shooting an Elephant: And Other Essays
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