Quote

He thought with a kind of astonishment of the biological uselessness of pain and fear, the treachery of the human body which always freezes into inertia at exactly the moment when a special effort is needed.

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
Always
Pain
Inertia
Fear
Freeze
Moments
Biological
Thought
Exactly
Body
Needed
Freezes
Human
Special
Uselessness
Humans
Effort
Treachery
Kind
Moment
Astonishment

More quotes by George Orwell

Image
Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.
George Orwell
Image
The whole experience of being hit by a bullet is very interesting and I think worth describing in detail.
George Orwell
Image
Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals.
George Orwell
Image
But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
George Orwell
Image
Within any important issue, there are always aspects no one wishes to discuss.
George Orwell
Image
Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.
George Orwell
Image
It was given out that the animals there practised cannibalism, tortured one another with red-hot horseshoes, and had their females in common. This was what came of rebelling against the laws of Nature, Frederick and Pilkington said.
George Orwell
Image
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it.
George Orwell
Image
The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.
George Orwell
Image
The Paris slums are a gathering-place for eccentric people - people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent. Poverty frees them from ordinary standards of behavior, just as money frees people from work.
George Orwell
Image
The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.
George Orwell
Image
All rulers in all ages have tried to impose a false view of the world upon their followers.
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
Happiness can exist only in acceptance.
George Orwell
Image
England is the most class-ridden country under the sun. It is a land of snobbery and privilege, ruled largely by the old and silly.
George Orwell
Image
Nothing holds it together except an idea which is indestructible.
George Orwell
Image
The Penguin books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.
George Orwell
Image
Writing a novel is agony.
George Orwell
Image
The war is not meant to be won, it is meant to be continuous.
George Orwell
Image
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