Quote

They clichés will construct your sentences for you - even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent - and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.

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
Thoughts
Clich
Certain
Construct
Need
Constructs
Important
Perform
Needs
Extent
Even
Sentences
Think
Service
Partially
Thinking
Meaning
Concealing

More quotes by George Orwell

Image
The Penguin books are splendid value for sixpence, so splendid that if other publishers had any sense they would combine against them and suppress them.
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
Image
If he thinks he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously think I see him do it, then the thing happens.
George Orwell
Image
All tyrannies rule through fraud and force, but once the fraud is exposed they must rely exclusively on force.
George Orwell
Image
How right the working classes are in their materialism. How right they are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time!
George Orwell
Image
You would not make the act of submission which is the price of sanity.
George Orwell
Image
Within any important issue, there are always aspects no one wishes to discuss.
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
When it comes to the pinch, human beings are heroic. Women face childbed and the scrubbing brush, revolutionaries keep their mouths shut in the torture chamber, battleships go down with their guns still firing when their decks are awash.
George Orwell
Image
For a second, two seconds, they had exchanged an equivocal glance, and that was the end of the story. But even that was a memorable event, in the locked loneliness in which one had to live.
George Orwell
Image
The Ministry of Peace concerns itself with war, the Ministry of Truth with lies, the Ministry of Love with torture and the Ministry of Plenty with starvation. These contradictions are not accidental , nor do they result from from ordinary hypocrisy: they are deliberate exercises in doublethink
George Orwell
Image
Writing a novel is agony.
George Orwell
Image
What opinions the masses hold, or do not hold, is looked upon as a matter of indifference. They can be granted intellectual liberty becasue they have no intellect.
George Orwell
Image
And yet, just for a moment, what almost frightening power had sounded in that cry from only a few hundred throats! Why was it that they could never shout like that about anything that mattered?
George Orwell
Image
The artist is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word Art, and everything is O.K. Rotting corpses with snails crawling over them are O.K. kicking little girls in the head is O.K. even a film like L'Age d'Or is O.K.
George Orwell
Image
A minority of one... the definition of insanity.
George Orwell
Image
Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase in pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop.
George Orwell
Image
It is one of the tragedies of the half-educated that they develop late, when they are already committed to some wrong way of life.
George Orwell
Image
You preferred to be a lunatic, a minority of one.
George Orwell