Quotes from George Orwell

The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.

War is a way of shattering to pieces... materials which might otherwise be used to make the masses too comfortable and... too intelligent.

I loathed the game, and since I could see no pleasure or usefulness in it, it was very difficult for me to show courage at it. Football, it seemed to me, is not really played for the pleasure of kicking a ball about, but is a species of fighting.

Clothes are powerful things. Dressed in a tramp's clothes it is very difficult, at any rate for the first day, not to feel that you are genuinely degraded.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words, it is war minus the shooting... there are quite enough real causes of trouble already, and we need not add to them by encouraging young men to kick each other on the shins amid the roars of infuriated spectators.

We may find in the long run that tinned food is a deadlier weapon than the machine-gun.

No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.

As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.

War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.

Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.

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

The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun.

There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.

The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

A family with the wrong members in control that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

A joke worth laughing at always has an idea behind it, and usually a subversive idea.

It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.

It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.

If you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics - a creed from which you yourself cannot expect to draw any material advantage - surely that proves that you are in the right?

All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

In places this book is a little over-written, because Mr Blunden is no more able to resist a quotation than some people are to refuse a drink.