Quote

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

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
Stills
Escaped
Still
Intellectuals
Whole
Absolutes
Long
Absolute
Good
Since
World
Common
People
Evil
Living

More quotes by George Orwell

Image
Imperialism as he [Kipling] sees it is a sort of forcible evangelising.
George Orwell
Image
Hunger reduces one to an utterly spineless, brainless condition, more like the after-effects of influenza than anything else. It is as though all one's blood had been pumped out and lukewarm water substituted.
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
Society has always seemed to demand a little more from human beings than it will get in practice.
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
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
She had had her momentary flowering, a year, perhaps, of wildrose beauty, and then she had suddenly swollen like a fertilized fruit and grown hard and red and coarse, and then her life had been laundering, scrubbing, laundering, first for children, then for grandchildren, over thirty years. At the end of it she was still singing.
George Orwell
Image
Antisemitism, for instance, is simply not the doctrine of a grown-up person.
George Orwell
Image
I am afraid of death. You are young, so presumably you're more afraid of it than I am. Obviously we shall put if off as long as we can. But it makes very little difference. So long as human beings stay human, death and life are the same thing.
George Orwell
Image
The Catholic and the Communist are alike in assuming that an opponent cannot be both honest and intelligent.
George Orwell
Image
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
Image
[A] world in which it is wrong to murder an individual civilian and right to drop a thousand tons of high explosive on a residential area does sometimes make me wonder whether this earth of ours is not a loony bin made use of by some other planet. Not to have a national anthem would be logical.
George Orwell
Image
... ages in which the dominant weapon is expensive or difficult to make will tend to be ages of despotism, whereas when the dominant weapon is cheap and simple, the common people have a chance... A complex weapon makes the strong stronger, while a simple weapon -- so long as there is no answer to it -- gives claws to the weak.
George Orwell
Image
It is curious how people take it for granted that they have a right to preach at you and pray over you as soon as your income falls below a certain level.
George Orwell
Image
Prolonged, indiscriminate reviewing of books is a quite exceptionally thankless, irritating and exhausting job. It not only involves praising trash but constantly inventing reactions towards books about which one has no spontaneous feeling whatever.
George Orwell
Image
To accept civilization as it is practically means accepting decay.
George Orwell
Image
All men are enemies. All animals are comrades
George Orwell
Image
Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English russophiles.
George Orwell
Image
Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.
George Orwell
Image
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