George Orwell

Bekannte Zitate von George Orwell

On the whole, human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

No advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimeter nearer.

Happiness can exist only in acceptance.

It is almost universally felt that when we call a country democratic we are praising it consequently, the defenders of every kind of regime claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they might have to stop using the word if it were tied down to any one meaning.

In our age there is no such thing as 'keeping out of politics.' All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.

A family with the wrong members in control that, perhaps, is as near as one can come to describing England in a phrase.

The very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world. Lies will pass into history.

The best books... are those that tell you what you know already.

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

Whatever is funny is subversive, every joke is ultimately a custard pie... a dirty joke is a sort of mental rebellion.

Good writing is like a windowpane.

War is war. The only good human being is a dead one.

All political thinking for years past has been vitiated in the same way. People can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes, and the most grossly obvious facts can be ignored when they are unwelcome.

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be.

Four legs good, two legs bad.

Part of the reason for the ugliness of adults, in a child's eyes, is that the child is usually looking upwards, and few faces are at their best when seen from below.

Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting.

Men can only be happy when they do not assume that the object of life is happiness.

He was an embittered atheist, the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike Him.

The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.

I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment.

We sleep safe in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.

Mankind is not likely to salvage civilization unless he can evolve a system of good and evil which is independent of heaven and hell.

Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

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