1,535 Quotes by George Orwell

From ... the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. ... I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer to paper the interminable restless monologue that had been running inside his head, literally for years.

I dreamed I dwelt in marble halls,And woke to find it true;I wasn't born for an age like this;Was Smith? Was Jones? Were you?

Political language … is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. One cannot change this all in a moment, but one can at least change one’s own habits, and from time to time one can even, if one jeers loudly enough, send some worn-out and useless phrase – some jackboot, Achilles’ heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno or other lump of verbal refuse – into the dustbin where it belongs.

Page after page, advert after advert. Lipsticks, undies, tinned food, patent medicines, slimming cures, face-creams. A sort of cross-section of the money world. A panorama of ignorance, greed, vulgarity, snobbishness, whoredom and disease.

I have managed to make the Capitalist class pay me several pounds a week for writing books against Capitalism.

[..] the great modern commandment - the eleventh commandment which has wiped out all the others: 'Thou shalt not lose thy job.

Vicisti, O Aspidistra!

A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors are not victims... but accomplices