Quotes About George Orwell

I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

Do you remember writing in your diary, he said, that it did not matter whether I was a friend or an enemy, since I was at least a person who understood you and could be talked to? You were right. I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.

Never listen when they tell you that Man and the animals have a common interest, that the prosperity of the one is the prosperity of the others. It is all lies. Man serves the interest of no creature except himself.

He was safe, everything was all right. He fell asleep murmuring Sanity is not statistical, with the feeling that this remark contained in it a profound wisdom.

The mere words "Socialism" and "Communism" draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, "Nature Cure" quack, pacifist, and feminist in England. . . . The food-crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in hopes of adding five years on to the life of his carcase; that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.

I was said of these bombs (referring to FAI bombs) that they were 'impartial'; they killed then man they were thrown at and the man who threw them.

I am not able, and I do not want, completely to abandon the world-view that I acquired in childhood. So long as I remain alive and well I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information.

The room was a world, a pocket of the past where extinct animals could walk.

He might be alone in holding that belief, and if alone, than a lunatic. But the thought of being a lunatic did not greatly trouble him: the horror was that he might also be wrong.

All in all it is difficult not to feel that pacifism, as it appears among a section of the intelligentsia, is secretly inspired by an admiration for power and successful cruelty.

What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked on as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty because they have no intellect.

Listen, the more men you've had, the more I love you. Do you understand that?" "Yes, perfectly." "I hate purity, I hate goodness. I don't want any virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones." "Well then, I ought to suit you, dear. I'm corrupt to the bones.

The whole incident could not have taken as much as half a minute. Not to let one's feelings appear in one's face was a habit that had acquired the status of an instinct, and in any case they had been standing straight in front of a telescreen when the thing happened. Nevertheless it had been very difficult not to betray a momentary surprise, for in the two or three seconds while he was helping her up the girl had slipped something into his hand.

To dislike a writer's politics is one thing. To dislike him because he forces you to think is another, not necessarily incompatible with the first.

Socialism does mean justice and liberty when the nonsense is stripped off it.

George Orwell on lefty/liberalism :- "the emotional shallowness of a left intelligentsia that lives in a world of ideas not reality, severed from the common culture of the country.

One could not avoid it, but one could perhaps postpone it: and yet instead, every now and again, by a conscious, wilful act, one chose to shorten the interval before it happened.

A Socialist United States of Europe seems to me the only worth-while political objective today

Pacifism is a tenable position, provided that you are prepared to live with the consequences.

Moreover [pacifists] do not as a rule condemn violence as such, but only violence used in defence of western countries

If one faces facts one must admit that nearly everything describable as Socialist literature is dull, tasteless, and bad

The POUM] posters, designed for a wider public (posters are important in Spain, with its large illiterate population).

Su madre tenía una especie de nobleza sólo por el hecho de regirse por normas privadas. Los sentimientos de ella eran realmente suyos y no los que el estado le mandaba tener.

And it was exactly at this moment that the significant thing happened -if, indeed, it did happen.