Quotes from George Orwell

These people don't see that if you encourage totalitarian methods, the time may come when they will be used against you instead of for you.

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

It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were clasped together. He had time to learn every detail of her hand.

Comrades, he said, here is a point that must be settled. The wild creatures, such as rats and rabbits–are they our friends or our enemies? Let us put it to the vote. I propose this question to the meeting: Are rats comrades? The vote was taken at once, and it was agreed by an overwhelming majority that rats were comrades. There were only four dissentients, the three dogs and the cat, who was afterwards discovered to have voted on both sides.

i) Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print. (ii) Never use a long word where a short one will do. (iii) If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out. (iv) Never use the passive where you can use the active. (v) Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent. (vi) Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.

I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY

Tea is one of the main stays of civilization in this country.

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:

For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.

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.

Reality is inside the skull.

At night all cats are grey.

All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.

It is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life.

Only because I prefer a positive to a negative. In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.

Has it ever occurred to you,' he said, 'that the whole history of English poetry has been de-termined by the fact that the English language lacks rhymes?

No sentimentality, comrade...The only good human being is a dead one.

From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing you can do with words is to surrender to them.

It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.

For some reason, all the best matadors were Fascists.

Money has become the grand test of virtue. By this test beggars fail, and for this they are despised. If one could earn even ten pounds a week at begging, it would become a respectable profession immediately. A beggar, looked at realistically, is simply a businessman, getting his living, like other businessmen, in the way that comes to hand. He has not, more than most modem people, sold his honour; he has merely made the mistake of choosing a trade at which it is impossible to grow rich.

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.

England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.