George Orwell quotes

England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.

A family with the wrong members in control—that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

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.

They take their cookery from Paris and their opinions from Moscow.

A generation of the unteachable is hanging upon us like a necklace of corpses.

Revolution does not mean red flags and street fighting, it means a fundamental shift of power.

The lady in the Rolls-Royce car is more damaging to morale than a fleet of Goering's bombing planes.

We cannot win the war without introducing Socialism, nor establish Socialism without winning the war.

It will shoot traitors, but it will give them a solemn trial beforehand and occasionally it will acquit them.

I believe in England, and I believe that we shall go forward.

He is a sort of caryatid upon whose shoulders nearly everything that is not grimy is supported.

At those times the place is like hell, or at any rate like my own mental picture of hell.

You can never forget that spectacle once you have seen it—the line of bowed, kneeling figures, sooty black all over, driving their huge shovels under the coal with stupendous force and speed.

For it is brought home to you, at least while you are watching, that it is only because miners sweat their guts out that superior persons can remain superior.

It is a kind of duty to see and smell such places now and again, especially smell them, lest you should forget that they exist; though perhaps it is better not to stay there too long.

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

The road from Mandalay to Wigan is a long one and the reasons for taking it are not immediately clear.

That was what we were taught—the lower classes smell.

One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

Socialism means the overthrow of tyranny, at home as well as abroad.

we have nothing to lose but our aitches.