George Orwell quotes

So great is the difference between two sets of initials!

One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.

One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word 'comrade' stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug.

There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all.

Libel settles nothing.

Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the centre of an explosion.

I thought what a good thing it was to be alive in a world where silver poplars grow.

Smillie's death is not a thing I can easily forgive.

Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings.

…all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

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

If men would behave decently the world would be decent.

All art is propaganda. Neither Dickens himself nor the majority of Victorian novelists would have thought of denying this. On the other hand, not all propaganda is art.

…the face of a man who is generously angry—in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.

But notice the phrase 'necessary murder'. It could only be written by a person to whom murder is at most a word.

So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot.

Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.

The whale's belly is simply a womb big enough for an adult.

Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles.

The year is 1910—or 1940, but it is all the same.

And now abideth faith, hope, money, these three; but the greatest of these is money.

It isn't a coin, it's the answer to a riddle.

There will be no revolution in England while there are aspidistras in the windows.

Money is what God used to be.

The first effect of poverty is that it kills thought.