Quote

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

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
Darkness
Overheard
Sound
Guesswork
Moment
Scrutinized
Assumption
Moments
Instinct
Live
Became
Made
Except
Every
Habit

More quotes by George Orwell

Image
I'm fat, but I'm thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there's a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there's a statue inside every block of stone?
George Orwell
Image
At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.
George Orwell
Image
The Party is not concerned with perpetuating its blood but with perpetuating itself. WHO wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.
George Orwell
Image
Snobbishness, like hypocrisy, is a check upon behaviour whose value from a social point of view has been underrated.
George Orwell
Image
Real journalism is publishing something that somebody else does not want published - the rest is just public relations.
George Orwell
Image
No one can look back on his schooldays and say with truth that they were altogether unhappy.
George Orwell
Image
They clichés will construct your sentences for you - even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent - and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.
George Orwell
Image
The food crank is by definition a person willing to cut himself off from human society in the hopes of adding five years onto the life of his carcase that is, a person out of touch with common humanity.
George Orwell
Image
History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by neurotics.
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
The belly comes before the soul.
George Orwell
Image
Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
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
To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.
George Orwell
Image
No animal shall kill any other animal WITHOUT CAUSE.
George Orwell
Image
The main motive for nonattachment is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.
George Orwell
Image
That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.
George Orwell
Image
As with the Christian religion, the worst advertisement for Socialism is its adherents.
George Orwell
Image
The essential act of war is destruction, not necessarily of human lives, but of the products of human labor.
George Orwell
Image
They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening
George Orwell