Quotes from George Orwell

The Communism of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.

It is unquestionably true that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during 'God save the King' than of stealing from a poor box

The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.

Before the war and especially before the Boer War it was summer all the year round.

The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W.H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.

Probably the best nonsense poetry is produced gradually and accidentally, by communities rather than by individuals.

Politics is the choice between the lesser of two evils.

In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of polities'. All issues are political issues.

in our age there is no such thing as " keeping out of politics " all issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and .

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one's own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.

Now I will tell you the answer to my question. It is this. The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power, pure power.

Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges.

He would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.

England is perhaps the only great country whose intellectuals are ashamed of their own nationality.

And it is a great thing to die in your own bed, though it is better still to die in your boots.

The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

From the totalitarian point of view, history is something to be created rather than learned.

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.

The most stirring battle-poem in English is about a brigade of cavalry which charged in the wrong direction.