Quote

What is to be expected of them is not treachery, or physcial cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing.

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
Instinct
Expected
Wrong
Sabotage
Thing
Treachery
Infallible
Cowardice
Unconscious
Stupidity

More quotes by George Orwell

Image
The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection.
George Orwell
Image
He would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies.
George Orwell
Image
Almost as swiftly as he had imagined it, she had torn her clothes off, and when she flung them aside it was with that same magnificent gesture by which a whole civilization seemed to be annihilated.
George Orwell
Image
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
Image
The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped.
George Orwell
Image
On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.
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
The stars are a free show it don’t cost anything to use your eyes
George Orwell
Image
To do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife.
George Orwell
Image
For the future. For the unborn.
George Orwell
Image
I felt as if I was the only person awake in a city of sleepwalkers. That's an illusion, of course. When you walk through a crowd of strangers it's next door to impossible not to imagine that they're all waxworks, but probably they're thinking just the same about you.
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
What is not hereditary cannot be permanent.
George Orwell
Image
I am well acquainted with all the arguments against freedom of thought and speech - the arguments which claim that it cannot exist, and the arguments which claim that it ought not to. I answer simply that they don't convince me and that our civilization over a period of four hundred years has been founded on the opposite notice.
George Orwell
Image
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, but then fail all the more completely because he drinks.
George Orwell
Image
All true tea lovers not only like their tea strong, but like it a little stronger with each year that passes.
George Orwell
Image
The Puritanical nonsense of excluding children and therefore to some extent women from pubs has turned these places into mere boozing shops instead of the family gathering places that they ought to be.
George Orwell
Image
Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
George Orwell
Image
There is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one side stands more of less for progress, the other side more or less for reaction.
George Orwell
Image
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.
George Orwell