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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
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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
Flies
Tails
Sooner
Given
Keep
Would
Tail
More quotes by George Orwell
Man serves the interests of no creature except himself.
George Orwell
The four great motives for writing prose are sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.
George Orwell
The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule , between good and evil but between two evils. You can let the Nazis rule the world : that is evil or you can overthrow them by war , which is also evil. There is no other choice before you, and whichever you choose you will not come out with clean hands.
George Orwell
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself. You must know all the while that it is there, but until it is needed you must never let it emerge into your consciousness in any shape that can be given a name.
George Orwell
History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.
George Orwell
All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.
George Orwell
Joyce is a poet and also an elephantine pedant.
George Orwell
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
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
I would sooner be a foreigner in Spain than in most countries. How easy it is to make friends in Spain!
George Orwell
The object of terrorism is terrorism. The object of oppression is oppression. The object of torture is torture. The object of murder is murder. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?
George Orwell
No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?
George Orwell
Sanity is not statistical.
George Orwell
Serious sport is war minus the shooting.
George Orwell
I had been in London innumerable times, and yet till that day I had never noticed one of the worst things about London-the fact that it costs money even to sit down.
George Orwell
A Socialist United States of Europe seems to me the only worth-while political objective today
George Orwell
War is evil, but it is often the lesser evil.
George Orwell
We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull.
George Orwell
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone— to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone: From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink — greetings!
George Orwell
The upper class desire to remain so, the middle class wish to overthrow the upper class, and the lower class want a classless system.
George Orwell