George Orwell quotes

Coming up for air! But there isn't any air. The dustbin that we're in reaches up to the stratosphere.

Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.

One ought to be able to hold in one's head simultaneously the two facts that Dali is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being.

And yet even the best wall in the world deserves to be pulled down if it surrounds a concentration camp.

He is an exhibitionist and a careerist, but he is not a fraud.

Dickens is one of those writers who are well worth stealing.

If men would behave decently the world would be decent.

He is all fragments, all details—rotten architecture, but wonderful gargoyles—and never better than when he is building up some character who will later on be forced to act inconsistently.

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie…

Kipling is the only English writer of our time who has added phrases to the language.

A good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious.

Wells is too sane to understand the modern world.

All revolutions are failures, but they are not all the same failure.

…the events of 1941 do not convict Wodehouse of anything worse than stupidity.

The phrase "Great War", when it occurs in the earlier essays, refers to the war of 1914-18. It still seemed great in those days.

Poverty is what I am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this slum.

Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behaviour, just as money frees people from work.

It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty.

…you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future.

It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out.

A plongeur is a slave, and a wasted slave, doing stupid and largely unnecessary work.

Fear of the mob is a superstitious fear.

I shall never again think that all tramps are drunken scoundrels, nor expect a beggar to be grateful when I give him a penny, nor be surprised if men out of work lack energy.

It was the first time that I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle.

In trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and the enemy.