1,535 Quotes by George Orwell

What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person.

... seria praticamente impossível reconstruir a história de todo aquele período, dizer quem lutava contra quem neste ou naquele dado momento, pois não havia registros escritos e os relatos orais jamais se referiam a algum quadro político diferente do vigente.

Not to expose your true feelings to an adult seems to be instinctive from the age of seven or eight onwards.

Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway cuttings smothered in wildflowers... the red buses, the blue policemen -- all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

The Russians Communists persecuted heresy more cruelly than the Inquisition has done. Before they exposed their victims to public trial, they deliberately set themselves to destroy their dignity.

Pacifism is objectively pro-fascist. This is elementary common sense. If you hamper the war effort of one side, you automatically help out that of the other. Nor is there any real way of remaining outside such a war as the present one. In practice, 'he that is not with me is against me'.

...the object of waging a war is always to be in a better position in which to wage another war.

There are occasions when it pays better to fight and be beaten than not to fight at all.

[Tolstoy] does not necessarily get rid of [his angry] temperament by undergoing religious conversion, and indeed it is obvious that the illusion of having been reborn may allow one's native vices to flourish more freely than ever, though perhaps in subtler forms.