"Before the war, and especially before the Boer War, it was summer all the year round."
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Quote collection
George Orwell quotes (page 23 of 39)
767 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane."
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"Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy. Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend."
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"During part of 1941 and 1942, when the Luftwaffe was busy in Russia, the German radio regaled its home audience with stories of devastating air raids on London. Now, we are aware that those raids did not happen. But what use would our knowledge be if the Germans conquered Britain? For the purpose of a future historian, did those raids happen, or didn't they? The answer is: If Hitler survives, they happened, and if he falls they didn't happen."
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"Records told the same tale, then the lie passed into history and became truth."
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"Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice."
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"You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one."
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"In my opinion nothing has contributed more to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country."
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"I would sooner be a foreigner in Spain than in most countries. How easy it is to make friends in Spain!"
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"[Political] prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house."
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"The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor."
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"In moments of crisis one is never fighting against an external enemy but always against one's own body."
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"The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent."
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"The men who were well enough to stand had moved across the carriage to cheer the Italians as they went past. A crutch waved out of the window; bandaged forearms made the Red Salute. It was like an allegorical picture of war; the trainload of fresh men gliding proudly up the line, the maimed men sliding slowly down, and all the while the guns on the open trucks making one's heart leap as guns always do, and reviving that pernicious feeling, so difficult to get rid of, that war *is* glorious after all."
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"The plant is blind but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will continue to do this in the face of endless discouragements."
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"We believe half-instinctively that evil always defeats itself in the long run. Pacifism is founded largely on this belief. Don't resist evil, and it will somehow destroy itself. But why should it? What evidence is there that it does... unless conquered from the outside by military force?"
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"The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils."
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"I always disagree, however, when people end up saying that we can only combat Communism, Fascism or what not if we develop an equal fanaticism. It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence."
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"The hospital is the antechamber to the tomb"
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"The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background."
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