Quotes from George Orwell

they'll shoot me I dont care they'll shoot me in the back of the neck I dont care down with big brother they always shoot you in the back of the neck I dont care down with big brother

Some nationalists are not far from schizophrenia, living quite happily amid dreams of power and conquest which have no connexion with the physical world.

A machine evolves by becoming more efficient, that is, more foolproof; hence the objective of mechanical progress is a foolproof world—which may or may not mean a world inhabited by fools.

Beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events.

A few animals still felt faintly doubtful, but Squealer asked them shrewdly, 'Are you certain that this is not something that you have dreamed, comrades? Have you any record of such a resolution? Is it written down anywhere?' And since it was certainly true that nothing of the kind existed in writing, the animals were satisfied that they had been mistaken.

The trade union members who formed themselves into militias and chased the Fascists back to Saragossa in the first few weeks of war had done so largely because they believed themselves to be fighting for working-class control; but it was becoming more and more obvious that working-class control was a lost cause, and the common people, especially the town proletariat, who have to fill the ranks in any war, civil or foreign, could not be blamed for a certain apathy.

In the English press this was translated into English terms and took this form: that arms were desperately needed on the Aragón front and could not be sent there because the unpatriotic Anarchists were holding them back. To put it like this is to ignore the conditions actually existing in Spain.

The shells the Fascists were firing at this period were wretchedly bad. Although they were 150 mm they only made a crater about six feet wide by four deep, and at least one in four failed to explode. There were the usual romantic tales of sabotage in the Fascist factories and unexploded shells in which, instead of the charge, there was found a scrap of paper saying 'Red Front', but I never saw one.

The freedom of the Press in Britain was always something of a fake, because in the last resort, money controls opinion;

Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to present an appearance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant.

if you took 1 Corinthians, chapter thirteen, and in every verse wrote 'money' instead of 'charity', the chapter had ten times as much meaning as before.

The mechanisation of the world could never proceed very far while taste, even the taste-buds of the tongue, remained uncorrupted, because in that case most of the products of the machine would be simply unwanted.

When are we going to attack? Why don't we attack?' were the questions you heard night and day from Spaniard and Englishman alike. When you think what fighting means it is queer that soldiers want to fight, and yet undoubtedly they do. In stationary warfare there are three things that all soldiers long for: a battle, more cigarettes, and a week's leave.

On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran.

It returned to-night, for just a little while-just as long as it takes to smoke two cigarettes. With smoke tickling his lungs, he abstracted himself from the mean and actual world. He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.

All animals are equal. But some animals are more equal than others.

The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude.   It

Every Communist is in fact liable at any moment to have to alter his most fundamental convictions, or leave the party. The unquestionable dogma of Monday may become the damnable heresy of Tuesday, and so on.

what is important for my purpose is that it was during the "anti-Fascist" phase that the younger English writers gravitated towards Communism. The

It is obvious that a person who reads Mein Kampf must be a Fascist.

This is war! Isn't it bloody?

Everything other than working was forbidden: walking in the streets, having fun, singing, dancing, getting together, everything was forbidden.

Instead—she did not know why—they had come to a time when no one dared speak his mind, when fierce, growling dogs roamed everywhere

for instance, 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.