1,535 Quotes by George Orwell

Dickens is obviously a writer whose parts are greater than his wholes. He is all fragments, all details—rotten architecture, but wonderful gargoyles...

Rudyard Kipling was the only popular writer of this century who was not at the same time a thoroughly bad writer.

For money buys all virtues. Money suffereth long and is kid, is not puffed up, doth not behave unseemly, seeketh not her own

The command of the old despotisms was "Thou shalt not". The command of the totalitarians was "Thou shalt". Our command is "Thou are".

It will be seen that, as used, the word ‘Fascism’ is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else.

Some ideas are so stupid that only intellectuals believe them.

Of course he chanted with the rest: it was impossible to dootherwise. To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, todo what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction.

All the brass instruments and big drums in the world cannot turn ‘God Save the King’ into a good tune, but on the very rare occasions when it is sung in full it does spring to life in the two lines:Confound their politics,Frustrate their knavish tricks!And, in fact, I had always imagined that the second verse is habitually left out because of a vague suspicion on the part of the Tories that these lines refer to themselves.

I hate purity, I hate goodness! I don't want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone to be corrupt to the bones.