George Orwell Quotes - Page 6

Knowledge owns the past and future, as long as we've the information we've power over the future.

It was somehow slightly frightening, like the gambolling of tiger cubs which will soon grow up into man-eaters.

The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?

We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.

For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life trying to impress the 'natives,' and so in every crisis he has got to do what the 'natives' expect of him... A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things.

The whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish day-dream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.

One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.

Writing a novel is agony.

Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold.

Nothing exists except through human consciousness

Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, the less you worry.

For after all, what is there behind, except money? Money for the right kind of education, money for influential friends, money for leisure and peace of mind, money for trips to Italy. Money writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, O lord, give me money, only money.

Remember that the bad days are not forever, and the trouble which seems so terrible at last.

Inequality was the price of civilization.

[T]he imagination, like certain wild animals, will not breed in captivity.

In reality there is no kind of evidence or argument by which one can show that Shakespeare, or any other writer, is "good". Nor is there any way of definitely proving that-for instance-Warwick Beeping is "bad". Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.

She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty years. At the end of it she was still singing.

People worship power in the form in which they are able to understand it.

What now strikes as remarkable about the new moneyed class of the nineteenth century is their complete irresponsibility;they see everything in terms of individual success, with hardly any consciousness that the community exists.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever.