Explore Quotes by George Orwell

Perhaps a lunatic was simply a minority of one.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

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

In real life it is always the anvil that breaks the hammer.

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.

He was conscious of nothing except the blankness of the page in front of him, the itching of the skin above his ankle, the blaring of the music, and a slight booziness caused by the gin.

Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.

The essential point here is that all people with small, insecure incomes are in the same boat and ought to be fighting on the same side. Probably we could do with a little less talk about' capitalist' and 'proletarian' and a little more about the robbers and the robbed.

It was with the last revolution and the coming of INGSOC (Inglish/English Socialism) that the latest High learnt how to keep their position permanently - by cultivating ignorance among the other classes and by constantly surveying them through the Thought Police. Part of this strategy included the maintenance of a state of continual warfare, which Goldstein discussed in the third chapter. The three major powers were not fighting this perpetual war for victory; they were fighting to keep a state of emergency always present as the surest guarantee of authoritarianism.

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day be day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except the endless present in which the party is always right.

All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers.

The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils.

There is only one way to make money at writing, and that is to marry a publisher's daughter.

Real journalism is publishing something that somebody else does not want published - the rest is just public relations.

Think of something you really care about. Then add hour to hour and calculate the fraction of your life that you've actually spent in doing it. And then calculate the time you've spent on things like shaving, riding to and fro on buses, waiting in railway junctions, swapping dirty stories, and reading the newspapers.

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to he a _x000D_ failure, and then fail all the more completely because he _x000D_ drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the _x000D_ English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because _x000D_ our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language _x000D_ makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.

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

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.

Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip.

In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.