Quote

One can love a child, perhaps, more deeply than one can love another adult, but it is rash to assume that the child feels any love in return.

George Orwell

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

George Orwell
Age: 46 †
Born: 1903
Born: June 25
Died: 1950
Died: January 21
Autobiographer
Bookseller
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Novelist
Opinion Journalist
Poet
Screenwriter
War Correspondent
Writer
Eric Blair
P. S. Burton
Eric Arthur Blair
John Freeman
Feels
Assume
Children
Assuming
Love
Deeply
Adults
Return
Perhaps
Child
Rash
Another
Adult

More quotes by George Orwell

Image
As a rule they will refuse even to sample a foreign dish, they regard such things as garlic and olive oil with disgust, life is unliveable to them unless they have tea and puddings.
George Orwell
Image
Roughly speaking, the more one pays for food, the more sweat and spittle one is obliged to eat with it.... Dirtiness is inherent in hotels and restaurants, because sound food is sacrificed to punctuality and smartness.
George Orwell
Image
It could not have been ten seconds, and yet it seemed a long time that their hands were clasped together. He had time to learn every detail of her hand.
George Orwell
Image
It struck him that the truly characteristic thing about modern life was not its cruelty and insecurity, but simply its bareness, its dinginess, its listlessness. Life, if you looked about you, bore no resemblance not only to the lies that streamed out of the telescreens, but even to the ideals that the party was trying to achieve.
George Orwell
Image
And the bigger the fall, the bigger the joke. It would be better fun to throw a custard pie at a bishop than at a curate.
George Orwell
Image
Winston Churchill could not definitely remember a time when his country had not been at war.
George Orwell
Image
It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
George Orwell
Image
Four legs gooood, two legs baaad!
George Orwell
Image
Stupidity was as necessary as intelligence, and as difficult to attain.
George Orwell
Image
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. 'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.
George Orwell
Image
The war is waged against its own subjects and its object is not the victory...but to keep the very structure of society intact.
George Orwell
Image
To say I accept in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration-camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas-masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press-censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murder.
George Orwell
Image
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible... Thus, political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness... Political language [is] designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.
George Orwell
Image
The animals were happy as they had never conceived it possible to be. Every mouthful of food was an acute positive pleasure, now that it was truly their own food, produced by themselves and for themselves, not doled out to them by a grudging master.
George Orwell
Image
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that can be given a name.
George Orwell
Image
To exchange one orthodoxy for another is not necessarily an advance. The enemy is the gramophone mind, whether or not one agrees with the record that is being played at the moment.
George Orwell
Image
In this game that we're playing, we can't win. Some kinds of failure are better than other kinds, that's all.
George Orwell
Image
. . . it is a corrupting thing to live one's real life in secret. One should live with the stream of life, not against it.
George Orwell
Image
Probably the best nonsense poetry is produced gradually and accidentally, by communities rather than by individuals.
George Orwell
Image
The major problem of our time is the decay in the belief in personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with while the average human being is either drudging like an ox or shivering in fear of the secret police... How right [the working classes] are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time!
George Orwell