George Orwell: Trending quotes (page 9)

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“Living a lie the whole time — the lie that we're here to uplift our poor black brothers instead of to rob them … it corrupts us, it corrupts us in ways you can't imagine.”

George Orwell book Burmese Days

John Flory, Ch. III
Burmese Days (1934)

Lie , Way , Imagination , Time

“Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though all one's blood had been pumped out and lukewarm water substituted.”

George Orwell book Down and Out in Paris and London

Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 7

Hunger , Water

“Most of the employees were the hard-boiled, Americanized, go-getting type to whom nothing in the world is sacred, except money. They had their cynical code worked out. The public are swine; advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill-bucket. And yet beneath their cynicism there was the final naivete, the blind worship of the money-god.”

George Orwell book Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Source: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Ch. 3

Money , God , World , Swine

“The past is a curious thing. It's with you all the time. I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it's got no reality, it's just a set of facts that you've learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn't merely come back to you, you're actually in the past.”

George Orwell book Coming Up for Air

Coming Up for Air, Part I, Ch. 4 (1939)

Books , History , Thinking , Reality

“Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side.”

George Orwell

Letter to H. J. Willmett (18 May 1944), published in The Collected Essays, Journalism, & Letters, George Orwell: As I Please, 1943-1945 (2000), edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus https://books.google.com/books?id=fCRLPIbLP8IC&lpg=PA149&dq=%22intellectuals%20are%20more%20totalitarian%20in%20outlook%22&pg=PA149#v=onepage&q=%22intellectuals%20are%20more%20totalitarian%20in%20outlook%22&f=false

People , Secret , Feeling , History

“An earthquake is such fun when it is over.”

George Orwell book Burmese Days

Source: Burmese Days (1934), Ch. XV

“If you talk to a thoughtful Christian, Catholic or Anglican, you often find yourself laughed at for being so ignorant as to suppose that anyone ever took the doctrines of the Church literally.”

George Orwell

As I Please (1943–1947)

“The most bitter insult one can offer to a Londoner is "bastard" — which, taken for what it means, is hardly an insult at all.”

George Orwell book Down and Out in Paris and London

Source: Down and out in Paris and London (1933), Ch. 32

“Society has always to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.”

George Orwell

"The Art of Donald McGill" (1941)

“Orthodoxy, of whatever colour, seems to demand a lifeless, imitative style.”

George Orwell book Politics and the English Language

Politics and the English Language (1946)

“It seemed queer, in the barber's shop, to see the Anarchist notice still on the wall, explaining that tips were prohibited. "The Revolution has struck off our chains," the notice said. I felt like telling the barbers that their chains would soon be back on again if they didn't look out.”

George Orwell book Homage to Catalonia

Homage to Catalonia (1938)

“Poverty is spiritual halitosis.”

George Orwell book Keep the Aspidistra Flying

Source: Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), Ch. 5

“Thus, for example, tanks, battleships and bombing planes are inherently tyrannical weapons, while rifles, muskets, long-bows, and hand-grenades are inherently democratic weapons. A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon — so long as there is no answer to it — gives claws to the weak.”

George Orwell

"You and the Atom Bomb" http://orwell.ru/library/articles/ABomb/english/e_abomb, Tribune (19 October 1945)

Strong

“In any form of art designed to appeal to large numbers of people,…[t]he rich man is usually 'bad', and his machinations are invariably frustrated. 'Good poor man defeats bad rich man' is an accepted formula.”

George Orwell

"As I Please," Tribune (28 July 1944)<sup> http://alexpeak.com/twr/orwell/quotes/</sup>
As I Please (1943–1947)

People , Art

“I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY”

George Orwell book 1984

1984
Variant: I understand HOW: I do not understand WHY.

Understanding

“Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime IS death.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Death

“He loved Big Brother.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Love

“A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.”

George Orwell

“No sentimentality, comrade… The only good human being is a dead one.”

George Orwell book Animal Farm

Variant: The only good human being is a dead one.
Source: Animal Farm

Dead

“For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.”

George Orwell book 1984

Source: 1984

Loneliness