Quote

I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

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
Wondered
Avoid
Fool
Looking
Whether
Often
Others
Grasped
Done
Solely

More quotes by George Orwell

Image
It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs - and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.
George Orwell
Image
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
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
It is deliberate policy to keep even the favoured groups somewhere near the brink of hardship, because a general state of scarcity increases the importance of small privileges and thus magnifies the distinction between one group and another.
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
Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose
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
Creeds like pacifism or anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind. For if you have embraced a creed which appears to be free from the ordinary dirtiness of politics ... the more you are in the right (and) everybody else should be bullied into thinking otherwise.
George Orwell
Image
Contrary to popular belief, the past was not more eventful than the present. If it seems so it is because when you look backward things that happened years apart are telescoped together, and because very few of your memories come to you genuinely virgin.
George Orwell
Image
It was not the man's brain that was speaking it was his larynx.
George Orwell
Image
To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.
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
Despotic governments can stand 'moral force' till the cows come home what they fear is physical force.
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
History has to move in a certain direction, even if it has to be pushed that way by neurotics.
George Orwell
Image
He was a lonely ghost uttering a truth that nobody would ever hear. But so long as he uttered it, in some obscure way the continuity was not broken. It was not by making yourself heard but by staying sane that you carried on the human heritage.
George Orwell
Image
I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.
George Orwell
Image
To say I accept in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration-camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas-masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press-censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murder.
George Orwell
Image
Cricket is a game full or forlorn hopes and sudden dramatic changes of fortune and its rules are so ill-defined that their interpretation is partly an ethical business.
George Orwell
Image
Human beings were behaving as human beings and not as cogs in the capitalist machine.
George Orwell