Quotes by George Orwell

About George Orwell:

Eric Arthur Blair is marked by lucid prose, awareness of social injustice, opposition to totalitarianism, and outspoken support of democratic socialism.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.

George Orwell

Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.

George Orwell

Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.

George Orwell

I'm fat, but I'm thin inside... there's a thin man inside every fat man.

George Orwell

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

George Orwell

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

George Orwell

When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic.

George Orwell

I sometimes think that the price of liberty is not so much eternal vigilance as eternal dirt.

George Orwell

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.

George Orwell

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.

George Orwell

Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.

George Orwell

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.

George Orwell

Language ought to be the joint creation of poets and manual workers.

George Orwell

At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.

George Orwell

Don't you enjoy being alive? Don't you like feeling: This is me, this is my hand, this is my leg, I'm real, I'm solid, I'm alive! Don't you like this?

George Orwell

It reminded us that propaganda in some form or other lurks in every book, that every work of art has a meaning and a purpose — a political, social and religious purpose — that our aesthetic judgements are always coloured by our prejudices and bel...

George Orwell

And if our book consumption remains as low as it has been, at least let us admit that it is because reading is a less exciting pastime than going to the dogs, the pictures or the pub, and not because books, whether bought or borrowed, are too expensi...

George Orwell

There were only four dissentients, the three dogs and the cat, who was afterwards discovered to have voted on both sides.

George Orwell

Knowledge owns the past and future, as long as we've the information we've power over the future.

George Orwell

Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to do otherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction.

George Orwell

To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.

George Orwell

Author Bio

  • NameGeorge Orwell
  • DescriptionEnglish author and journalist
  • AliasesEric Arthur Blair; Eric Blair; John Freeman
  • BornJune 25, 1903
  • DiedJanuary 21, 1950
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionWar Correspondent; Poet; Essayist; Journalist; Novelist; Literary Critic; Autobiographer; Bookseller
  • WorksThe Road To Wigan Pier; Homage To Catalonia; Animal Farm; Nineteen Eighty-Four; Burmese Days; Coming Up For Air; Keep The Aspidistra Flying; A Clergyman's Daughter; Down And Out In Paris And London; Politics And The English Language; The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism And The English Genius; Why I Write
  • AwardsPrometheus Award - Hall Of Fame