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date: 16 February 2025

George Orwell 1903–50
English novelist 

  1. Man is the only creature that consumes without producing.
    Animal Farm (1945) ch. 1
  2. Four legs good, two legs bad.
    Animal Farm (1945) ch. 3
  3. All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.
    Animal Farm (1945) ch. 10
  4. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again, but already it was impossible to say which was which.
    Animal Farm (1945); closing words
  5. Good prose is like a window-pane.
    Collected Essays (1968) vol. 1 ‘Why I Write’
  6. I'm fat, but I'm thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there's a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there's a statue inside every block of stone?
    Coming up For Air (1939) pt. 1, ch. 3; see Connolly
  7. Roast beef and Yorkshire, or roast pork and apple sauce, followed up by suet pudding and driven home, as it were, by a cup of mahogany-brown tea, have put you in just the right mood. Your pipe is drawing sweetly, the sofa cushions are soft underneath you, the fire is well alight, the air is warm and stagnant. In these blissful circumstances, what is it that you want to read about?
     
    Naturally, about a murder.
    Decline of the English Murder and other essays (1965) title essay, written 1946
  8. Down and out in Paris and London.
    title of book (1933)
  9. He was an embittered atheist (the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him), and took a sort of pleasure in thinking that human affairs would never improve.
    Down and Out in Paris and London (1933) ch. 30
  10. Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway cuttings smothered in wild flowers…the red buses, the blue policemen—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.
    Homage to Catalonia (1938)
  11. Keep the aspidistra flying.
    title of novel (1936)
  12. Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
    Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936) ch. 3
  13. England…resembles a family, a rather stuffy Victorian family, with not many black sheep in it but with all its cupboards bursting with skeletons…A family with the wrong members in control.
    The Lion and the Unicorn (1941) pt. 1 ‘England Your England’
  14. Old maids biking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn mornings…these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene.
    The Lion and the Unicorn (1941) pt. 1 ‘England Your England’; see Major
  15. 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.
    The Lion and the Unicorn (1941) pt. 1 ‘England Your England’; see Wellington
  16. It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.
    Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) pt. 1, ch. 1
  17. big brother is watching you.
    Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) pt. 1, ch. 1
  18. War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
    Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) pt. 1, ch. 1
  19. Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
    Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) pt. 1, ch. 3
  20. Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
    Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) pt. 1, ch. 5
  21. Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
    Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) pt. 1, ch. 7
  22. Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
    Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) pt. 2, ch. 9
  23. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
    Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) pt. 3, ch. 3
  24. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—for ever.
    Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) pt. 3, ch. 3
  25. The ordinary human being would sooner starve than live on brown bread and raw carrots. And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and ryvita biscuits; [but]…When you are underfed, harassed, bored and miserable, you don't want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty.’
    The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) ch. 6
  26. A man dies and is buried, and all his words and actions are forgotten, but the food he has eaten lives after him in the sound or rotten bones of his children.
    The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) ch. 6
  27. To the ordinary working man, the sort you would meet in any pub on Saturday night, Socialism does not mean much more than better wages and shorter hours and nobody bossing you about.
    The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) ch. 11
  28. The high-water mark, so to speak, of Socialist literature is W. H. Auden, a sort of gutless Kipling.
    The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) ch. 11
  29. We of the sinking middle class…may sink without further struggles into the working class where we belong, and probably when we get there it will not be so dreadful as we feared, for, after all, we have nothing to lose but our aitches.
    The Road to Wigan Pier (1937) ch. 13
  30. Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, and disregard of all the rules.
    Shooting an Elephant (1950) ‘I Write as I Please’
  31. Serious sport…is war minus the shooting.
    Shooting an Elephant (1950) ‘I Write as I Please’
  32. 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.
    Shooting an Elephant (1950) ‘Politics and the English Language’
  33. In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.
    Shooting an Elephant (1950) ‘Politics and the English Language’
  34. Political language…is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.
    Shooting an Elephant (1950) ‘Politics and the English Language’
  35. Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
    Shooting an Elephant (1950) ‘Reflections on Gandhi’
  36. Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie…A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
    in Horizon September 1941 ‘The Art of Donald McGill’
  37. If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.
    ‘The Freedom of the Press’ ( written 1944), in Times Literary Supplement 15 September 1972
  38. The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.
    in Polemic January 1946
  39. The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
    in Polemic May 1946 ‘Second Thoughts on James Burnham’
  40. At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.
    last words in his notebook, 17 April 1949