Quote

I understand HOW. I do not understand WHY

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
Understand

More quotes by George Orwell

Image
The cheaper books become, the less money is spent on books.
George Orwell
Image
I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.
George Orwell
Image
Real power is achieved when the ruling class controls the material essentials of life, granting and withholding them from the masses as if they were privileges.
George Orwell
Image
There is a geographical element in all belief-saying what seem profound truths in India have a way of seeming enormous platitudes in England, and vice versa . Perhaps the fundamental difference is that beneath a tropical sun individuality seems less distinct and the loss of it less important.
George Orwell
Image
Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.
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
Good writing is like a windowpane.
George Orwell
Image
The pleasures of spring are available to everybody and cost nothing.
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
At fifty everyone has the face he deserves.
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
The quickest way of ending a war is to lose it.
George Orwell
Image
Being in a minority, even in a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.
George Orwell
Image
The fallacy is to believe that under a dictatorial government you can be free inside
George Orwell
Image
The secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with a power to learn from past mistakes.
George Orwell
Image
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again but already it was impossible to say which was which.
George Orwell
Image
You are a slow learner, Winston. How can I help it? How can I help but see what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four. Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.
George Orwell
Image
Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.
George Orwell
Image
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
George Orwell
Image
We shall meet in the place where there is no darkness.
George Orwell