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They were governed by private loyalties which they did not question. What mattered were individual relationships, and a completely helpless gesture, an embrace, a tear, a word spoken to a dying man, could have value in itself
George Orwell
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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
Men
Tears
Tear
Completely
Gestures
Dying
Helpless
Value
Spoken
Question
Loyalty
Loyalties
Word
Relationships
Mattered
Values
Embrace
Gesture
Individual
Private
Governed
More quotes by George Orwell
Bombing is not especially inhumane. War itself is inhumane and the bombing plane, which is used to paralyse industry and transport, is a relatively civilised weapon. 'Normal' or 'legitimate' warfare is just as destructive of inanimate objects and enormously so of human lives.
George Orwell
Why should be fruit be held inferior to the flower?
George Orwell
Never use a metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
George Orwell
It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it.
George Orwell
I enjoy talking to you. Your mind appeals to me. It resembles my own mind except that you happen to be insane.
George Orwell
All propaganda is lies, even when one is telling the truth.
George Orwell
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
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
It said what he would have said, if it had been possible for him to set his scattered thoughts in order. It was the product of a mind similar to his own, but enormously more powerful, more systematic, less fear-ridden. The best books, he perceived, are those that tell you what you know already.
George Orwell
The human beings did not hate Animal Farm any less now that it was prospering indeed, they hated it more than ever.
George Orwell
Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
George Orwell
In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people - the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me.
George Orwell
No one I met at this time -- doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients -- failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.
George Orwell
We are the dead. Our only true life is in the future. We shall take part in it as handfuls of dust and splinters of bone. But how far away that future may be, there is no knowing.
George Orwell
He would say that God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have had no tail and no flies.
George Orwell
The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.
George Orwell
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
I always disagree, however, when people end up saying that we can only combat Communism, Fascism or what not if we develop an equal fanaticism. It appears to me that one defeats the fanatic precisely by not being a fanatic oneself, but on the contrary by using one's intelligence.
George Orwell
From the proletarians nothing is to be feared. Left to themselves, they will continue from generation to generation and from century to century, working, breeding, and dying, not only without any impulse to rebel, but without the power of grasping that the world could be other than it is.
George Orwell
There is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.
George Orwell
