Quote

Looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity.

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
General
Anarchy
Looking
Empires
Horribly
May
Thrive
Heading
Whole
Stable
Headings
Many
Decades
Epoch
World
Slavery
Drift
Slave
Antiquity
Towards
Breakdown

More quotes by George Orwell

Image
The machine has got to be accepted, but it is probably better to accept it rather as one accepts a drug - that is, grudgingly and suspiciously. Like a drug, the machine is useful, dangerous, and habit-forming. The oftener one surrenders to it the tighter its grip becomes.
George Orwell
Image
Sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
George Orwell
Image
How could you communicate with the future? It was impossible. Either the future would resemble the present in which case it would not listen to him, or it would be different from it, and his predicament would be meaningless.
George Orwell
Image
The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.
George Orwell
Image
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
Image
For after all, what is there behind, except money? Money for the right kind of education, money for influential friends, money for leisure and peace of mind, money for trips to Italy. Money writes books, money sells them. Give me not righteousness, O lord, give me money, only money.
George Orwell
Image
People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.
George Orwell
Image
What is to be expected of them is not treachery, or physcial cowardice, but stupidity, unconscious sabotage, an infallible instinct for doing the wrong thing.
George Orwell
Image
The belly comes before the soul.
George Orwell
Image
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible... Thus, political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness... Political language [is] designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.
George Orwell
Image
All the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
George Orwell
Image
As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me. They do not feel any enmity against me as an individual, nor I against them. They are only 'doing their duty'
George Orwell
Image
The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.
George Orwell
Image
Writing a novel is agony.
George Orwell
Image
The more men you've had, the more I love you.
George Orwell
Image
It's not so much staying alive, it's staying human that's important. What counts is that we don't betray each other.
George Orwell
Image
The major problem of our time is the decay in the belief in personal immortality, and it cannot be dealt with while the average human being is either drudging like an ox or shivering in fear of the secret police... How right [the working classes] are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time!
George Orwell
Image
How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?
George Orwell
Image
The more intelligent, the less sane
George Orwell
Image
In so far as it takes effect at all, pacifist propaganda can only be effective against those countries where a certain amount of freedom of speech is still permitted in other words it is helpful to totalitarianism.
George Orwell