Quotes
In every one of those little stucco boxes there's some poor bastard who's never free except when he's fast asleep and dreaming that he's got the boss down the bottom of a well and is bunging lumps of coal at him.
Coming up for Air, pt. 1, ch. 2 (1939).To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.
"Looking Back on the Spanish War" (1943; repr. in Collected Essays, 1961).Most revolutionaries are potential Tories, because they imagine that everything can be put right by altering the shape of society; once that change is effected, as it sometimes is, they see no need for any other.
Inside the Whale and Other Essays, "Charles Dickens" (1940).Nationalism is power hunger tempered by self-deception.
Notes on Nationalism (1945; repr. in Collected Essays, 1961).To a surprising extent the war-lords in shining armour, the apostles of the martial virtues, tend not to die fighting when the time comes. History is full of ignominious getaways by the great and famous.
"Who Are the War Criminals?" (1943; repr. in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 2, ed. by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 1968).Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing.
Inside the Whale and Other Essays, "Charles Dickens" (1940).Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
Nineteen Eighty-Four, pt. 1, ch. 3 (1949), Ingsoc party slogan.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?
Shooting an Elephant, "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool" (1950).Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
Nineteen Eighty-Four, pt. 2, ch. 9 (1949), extract from Goldstein's book.At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.
The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4 (ed. by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 1968), last entry. Albert Camus, in The Fall (1956), expressed much the same when he wrote: "After a certain age every man is responsible for his face."On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
"The Art of Donald McGill," in Horizon (London, Sept. 1941; repr. in Collected Essays, 1961).The great disadvantage, and advantage, of the small urban bourgeois is his limited outlook. He sees the world as a middle-class world, and everything outside these limits is either laughable or slightly wicked.
Inside the Whale and Other Essays, "Charles Dickens" (1940).All people who have reached the point of becoming nations tend to despise foreigners, but there is not much doubt that the English-speaking races are the worst offenders. One can see this from the fact that as soon as they become fully aware of any foreign race they invent an insulting nickname for it.
Inside the Whale and Other Essays, "Charles Dickens" (1940).In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.
"Politics and the English Language" (1946; repr. in Shooting an Elephant, 1950).A tragic situation exists precisely when virtue does not triumph but when it is still felt that man is nobler than the forces which destroy him.
Shooting an Elephant, "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool" (1950).All writers are vain, selfish and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives lies a mystery. Writing a book is a long, 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.
"Why I Write" (1947; repr. in Collected Essays, 1961).There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more or less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.
"Looking Back on the Spanish War" (1943; repr. in Collected Essays, 1961).The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.
"The Prevention of Literature" (1946; repr. in Collected Essays, 1961).The high sentiments always win in the end, the leaders who offer blood, toil, tears and sweat always get more out of their followers than those who offer safety and a good time. When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.
"The Art of Donald McGill" in Horizon (London, Sept. 1941; repr. in Collected Essays, 1961).The intellectual is different from the ordinary man, but only in certain sections of his personality, and even then not all the time.
"Rudyard Kipling" (1942; repr. in Critical Essays, 1947).Most people get a fair amount of fun out of their lives, but on balance life is suffering, and only the very young or the very foolish imagine otherwise.
Shooting an Elephant, "Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool" (1950).The child thinks of growing old as an almost obscene calamity, which for some mysterious reason will never happen to itself. All who have passed the age of thirty are joyless grotesques, endlessly fussing about things of no importance and staying alive without, so far as the child can see, having anything to live for. Only child life is real life.
"Such, Such Were the Joys" (1947; repr. in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 1968).He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him).
Down and Out in Paris and London, ch. 30 (1933).Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.
"Such, Such were the Joys" (1947; repr. in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 1968).I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.
The Road to Wigan Pier, ch. 4 (1937)As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
The Road to Wigan Pier, ch. 11 (1937).Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
Winston Smith, in 1984, pt. 1, ch. 7 (1949), writing in his diary.The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another. Marx exploded a hundred tons of dynamite beneath the moralist position, and we are still living in the echo of that tremendous crash. But already, somewhere or other, the sappers are at work and fresh dynamite is being tamped in place to blow Marx at the moon. Then Marx, or somebody like him, will come back with yet more dynamite, and so the process continues, to an end we cannot foresee.
Inside the Whale and Other Essays, "Charles Dickens" (1940).One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.
"Such, Such were the Joys" (1947; repr. in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (ed. Sonia Orwell & Ian Angus, 1968). Orwell added: "Looking back on my own childhood, after the infant years were over, I do not believe that I ever felt love for any mature person, except my mother. . . . Love, the spontaneous, unqualified emotion of love was something I could only feel for people who were young."He left behind, as his essential contribution to literature, a large repertoire of jokes which survive because of their sheer neatness, and because of a certain intriguing uncertainty-which extends to Wilde himself-as to whether they really mean anything.
Lady Windermere's Fan-A Commentary," 21 Nov. 1943, BBC broadcast.To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.
Observer (London, 8 April 1945).Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton, but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.
The Lion and the Unicorn, pt. 1, "England Your England" (1941).Under the spreading chestnut tree
I sold you and you sold me:
There lie they, and here lie we
Under the spreading chestnut tree.
Popular song in Nineteen Eighty-Four, pt. 1, ch. 7, and passim (1949).So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.
Inside the Whale and Other Essays, "Inside the Whale" (1940).To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others.
Shooting an Elephant, "Reflections on Gandhi" (1950).Throughout recorded time . . . there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other. The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable.
First words of Goldstein's book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, pt. 2, ch. 9 (1949).Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.
"Confessions of a Book Reviewer" (1946; repr. in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4, ed. by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 1968).The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
"Second Thoughts on James Burnham," in Polemic (May 1946; repr. in Shooting an Elephant, 1950).Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.
"The English People" (1944; repr. in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 3, ed. by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 1968).Liberal-a power worshipper without power.
Shooting an Elephant, "Politics and the English Language" (1950).The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
Shooting an Elephant, "Politics and the English Language" (1950).To accept civilisation as it is practically means accepting decay.
Inside the Whale and Other Essays, "Inside the Whale" (1940).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.
"The Sporting Spirit" (1945; repr. in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4, ed. by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 1968).Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.
Inside the Whale and Other Essays, "Inside the Whale" (1940).Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.
"Such, Such were the Joys" (1947; repr. in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 1968).The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.
"Riding Down from Bangor" (1946; repr. in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4, ed. by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 1968).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.
Shooting an Elephant, "Thoughts on the Common Toad" (1950).No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.
"Such, Such were the Joys" (1947; repr. in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, ed. by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 1968).He is a man of thirty-five, but looks fifty. He is bald, has varicose veins and wears spectacles, or would wear them if his only pair were not chronically lost. If things are normal with him, he will be suffering from malnutrition, but if he has recently had a lucky streak, he will be suffering from a hangover. At present it is half past eleven in the morning, and according to his schedule he should have started work two hours ago; but even if he had made any serious effort to start he would have been frustrated by the almost continuous ringing of the telephone bell, the yells of the baby, the rattle of an electric drill out in the street, and the heavy boots of his creditors clumping up the stairs. The most recent interruption was the arrival of the second post, which brought him two circulars and an income tax demand printed in red. Needless to say this person is a writer.
"Confessions of a Book Reviewer" (1946; repr. in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 4, ed. by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 1968).Power-worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
Shooting an Elephant, "Second Thoughts on James Burnham" (1950).The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals.
Shooting an Elephant, "Reflections on Gandhi" (1950).If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face-forever.
O'Brien to Winston Smith, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, pt. 3, ch. 3 (1949).The "Communism" of the English intellectual is something explicable enough. It is the patriotism of the deracinated.
Inside the Whale and Other Essays, "Inside the Whale" (1940).For a creative writer possession of the "truth" is less important than emotional sincerity.
Inside the Whale and Other Essays, "Inside the Whale" (1940).But the thing that I saw in your face
No power can disinherit:
No bomb that ever burst
Shatters the crystal spirit.
Poem, 1943, included in Orwell's essay, "Looking Back on the Spanish War," sct. 7 (first published in England Your England, 1953).To write or even speak English is not a science but an art. There are no reliable words. . . . Whoever writes English is involved in a struggle that never lets up even for a sentence. He is struggling against vagueness, against obscurity, against the lure of the decorative adjective, against the encroachment of Latin and Greek, and, above all, against the worn-out phrases and dead metaphors with which the language is cluttered up.
"The English People" (1944; repr. in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 3, ed. by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 1968). Consequently, Orwell explained, "The peculiarities of the English language make it almost impossible for anyone who has left school at fourteen to learn a foreign language after he has grown up."All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
Animal Farm, ch. 10 (1945), the animals' Commandment at the end. The original version was, "All animals are equal."The main motive for "nonattachment" is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.
Shooting an Elephant, "Reflections on Gandhi" (1950).The atmosphere of orthodoxy is always damaging to prose, and above all it is completely ruinous to the novel, the most anarchical of all forms of literature.
Inside the Whale and Other Essays, "Inside the Whale" (1940).To say "I accept" in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration-camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas-masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press-censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murder.
Inside the Whale and Other Essays, "Inside the Whale" (1940).We of the sinking middle class . . . may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose but our aitches.
The Road to Wigan Pier, ch. 13 (1937).The existence of good bad literature-the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously-is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.
"Shooting an Elephant, "Good Bad Books" (1950).What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
Winston Smith, in Nineteen Eighty-Four, pt. 3, ch. 3 (1949), speaking of O'Brien.Myths which are believed in tend to become true.
"The English People" (1944; repr. in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 3, ed. by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus, 1968).As a rule they will refuse even to sample a foreign dish, they regard such things as garlic and olive oil with disgust, life is unliveable to them unless they have tea and puddings.
"The English People" (1944; repr. in The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, vol. 3, ed. by Sonia Orwell & Ian Angus, 1968), on the English attitude toward food.
Compiled by Ana Roig Guijarro and José Saiz Molina.
The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations is licensed from Columbia University Press.
Copyright © 1993 by Columbia University Press.
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