George Orwell
1984, Animal Farm, champion of political clarity
Most quoted
"No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?"
— from Animal Farm, 1945
"Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."
— from Politics and the English Language, 1946
"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."
— from Politics and the English Language, 1946
All quotes by George Orwell (198)
If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence.
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
The sin of nearly all left-wingers from 1933 onwards is that they have wanted to be anti-Fascist without being anti-totalitarian.
Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power.
The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.
One cannot really be Catholic and grown up.
I sometimes fear that intelligence will go the same way as a sense of humour; that it is being bred out of the human race.
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper.
Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
The enemies of freedom do not argue; they shout and they shoot.
To write or even speak English is like dressing in clothes that are too tight for one.
Good prose is like a windowpane.
All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives there lies a mystery.
I am not a pacifist, because I believe in the necessity of war in certain circumstances; but I am not a militarist, because I believe that war should only be undertaken if it is the lesser of two evils.
The starved and diseased men who come crawling from the slums are not fit for soldiers.
It is a mysterious thing, the loss of one's self-esteem.
To an ordinary man, the most horrible thing about war is the lack of food.
I have always been a soldier. I have known for years that when the time comes, I shall be killed.
Contemporaries of George Orwell
Other Literatures born within 50 years of George Orwell (1903–1950).