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
Thing
Treachery
Infallible
Cowardice
Unconscious
Stupidity
Instinct
Expected
Wrong
Sabotage

More quotes by George Orwell

Image
One of the effects of a safe and civilized life is an immense over sensitiveness which makes all the primary emotions somewhat disgusting.
George Orwell
Image
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
Image
In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.
George Orwell
Image
For weeks past he had been making ready for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.
George Orwell
Image
The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle, hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or laborer's cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.
George Orwell
Image
What can you do against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
George Orwell
Image
Good novels are not written by orthodoxy-sniffers, nor by people who are conscience-stricken about their own orthodoxy. Good novels are written by people who are not frightened.
George Orwell
Image
Good prose should be transparent, like a window pane.
George Orwell
Image
Advertising is the rattling of a stick inside a swill bucket.
George Orwell
Image
He drove his mind into the abyss where poetry is written.
George Orwell
Image
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness.
George Orwell
Image
Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?
George Orwell
Image
You had to live - did live, from habit that became instinct - in the assumption that evey sound you made was overheard, and, except in darkness, every moment scrutinized.
George Orwell
Image
Revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert and know how to chuck out their leaders as soon as the latter have done their job.
George Orwell
Image
How could you communicate with the future? It was impossible. Either the future would resemble the present in which case it would not listen to him, or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.
George Orwell
Image
Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.
George Orwell
Image
If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.
George Orwell
Image
In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.
George Orwell
Image
Mrs Weaver nosed among the books, too dim-witted to grasp that they were in alphabetical order.
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