Quote

I do not wish to comment on the work if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.

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
Comment
Failure
Wish
Speak
Doe
Writing
Work

More quotes by George Orwell

Image
People talk about the horrors of war, but what weapon has a man invented that even approaches in cruelty some of the commoner diseases? 'Natural' death, almost by defintion, means something slow, smelly and painful.
George Orwell
Image
The animals were happy as they had never conceived it possible to be. Every mouthful of food was an acute positive pleasure, now that it was truly their own food, produced by themselves and for themselves, not doled out to them by a grudging master.
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
Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.
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
The common people, on the whole, are still living in the world of absolute good and evil from which the intellectuals have long since escaped.
George Orwell
Image
A dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
George Orwell
Image
Freedom of the Press, if it means anything at all, means the freedom to criticize and oppose
George Orwell
Image
As soon as you think of fishing you think of things that don't belong to the modern world. The very idea of sitting all day under a willow tree beside a quiet pool - and being able to find a quiet pool to sit beside- belongs to a time before the war, before radio, before aeroplanes, before Hitler.
George Orwell
Image
Imperialism as he [Kipling] sees it is a sort of forcible evangelising.
George Orwell
Image
The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.
George Orwell
Image
The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.
George Orwell
Image
If there really is such a thing as turning in one's grave, Shakespeare must get a lot of exercise.
George Orwell
Image
The result of this is that so-called peace propaganda is just as dishonest and intellectually disgusting as war propaganda. Like war propaganda, it concentrates on putting forward a ‘case’, obscuring the opponent’s point of view and avoiding awkward questions.
George Orwell
Image
It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.
George Orwell
Image
Napoleon is always right.
George Orwell
Image
[...] you can get anything in this world if you genuinely don't want it.
George Orwell
Image
In any form of art designed to appeal to large numbers of people,...[t]he rich man is usually 'bad', and his machinations are invariably frustrated.: 'Good poor man defeats bad rich man' is an accepted formula.
George Orwell
Image
Until one has some kind of professional relationship with books, one does not discover how bad the majority of them are.
George Orwell
Image
Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
George Orwell