Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
Perhaps it is only when people are somewhere near the starvation level that they have anything to sing about.
George Orwell
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
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
Near
Somewhere
Sing
Level
Perhaps
Levels
Anything
People
Starvation
More quotes by George Orwell
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
By revolution we become more ourselves, not less.
George Orwell
Political writing in our time consists almost entirely of prefabricated phrases bolted together like the pieces of a child's Meccano set. It is the unavoidable result of self-censorship. To write in plain, vigorous language one has to think fearlessly, and if one thinks fearlessly one cannot be politically orthodox.
George Orwell
... ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance... 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
I have no wish to take life, not even human life
George Orwell
It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.
George Orwell
It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.
George Orwell
She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty years. At the end of it she was still singing.
George Orwell
I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.
George Orwell
We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it.
George Orwell
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
George Orwell
The existence of good bad literature—the fact that one can be amused or excited or even moved by a book that one's intellect simply refuses to take seriously—is a reminder that art is not the same thing as cerebration.
George Orwell
The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism. The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background.
George Orwell
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
The stars are a free show it don’t cost anything to use your eyes
George Orwell
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
At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question.
George Orwell
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
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
George Orwell
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.
George Orwell
