1,535 Quotes by George Orwell

A thing which I regret, and which I will try to remedy some time, is that I have never in my life planted a walnut. Nobody does plant them nowadays—when you see a walnut it is almost invariably an old tree. If you plant a walnut you are planting it for your grandchildren, and who cares a damn for his grandchildren?

After the sorts of winters we have had to endure recently, the spring does seem miraculous, because it has become gradually harder and harder to believe that it is actually going to happen. Every February since 1940 I have found myself thinking that this time winter is going to be permanent. But Persephone, like the toads, always rises from the dead at about the same moment. Suddenly, towards the end of March, the miracle happens and the decaying slum in which I live is transfigured.

Inequality was the price of civilization.

Literature is an attempt to influence one's contemporaries through the recording of experience.

Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. There is always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the old - generally not quite so bad, but still a tyrant. Consequently two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature? They appeal to different individuals, and they probably show a tendency to alternate in point of time.

Человек, быть может, не столько ждет любви, сколько понимания.

The further a society drifts from the truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.

La guerra es la paz, la libertad es la esclavitud.

His mother's memory tore at his heart because she had died loving him, she had sacrificed herself to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable.