I’m fat, but I’m thin inside. Has it ever struck you that there’s a thin man inside every fat man, just as they say there’s a statue inside every block of stone?
George Orwell, Coming Up for Air, London, 1939 pt. 1, ch. 3
Category Archives: George Orwell
George Orwell
Most of the time my separate existence looks pretty important to me[.]
George Orwell, Coming Up for Air, London, 1939, p. 8
George Orwell
People are wrong when they think that an unemployed man only worries about losing his wages; on the contrary, an illiterate man, with the work habit in his bones, needs work even more than he needs money. An educated man can put up with enforced idleness, which is one of the worst evils of poverty. But a man […] with no means of filling up time is as miserable out of work as a dog on the chain. That is why it is such nonsense to pretend that those who have ‘come down in the world’ are to be pitied above all others. The man who really merits pity is the man who has been down from the start, and faces poverty with a blank, resourceless mind.
George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, London, 1933, chap. 33
George Orwell
When I eat my dinner I don’t do it to the greater glory of God; I do it because I enjoy it. The world’s full of amusing things—books, wine, travel, friends—everything. I’ve never seen any meaning in it all, and I don’t want to see one. Why not take life as you find it?
George Orwell, A Clergyman’s Daughter, 1935
George Orwell
Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, London, 1949, pt. 1
George Orwell
The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.
George Orwell, ‘Why I Write’, in Decline of the English Murder and Other Essays, London, 1965, p. 186
George Orwell
Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949, pt. 3
George Orwell
With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end. Every citizen, or at least every citizen important enough to be worth watching, could be kept for twenty-four hours a day under the eyes of the police and in the sound of official propaganda, with all other channels of communication closed. The possibility of enforcing not only complete obedience to the will of the State, but uniformity of opinion of all subjects, now existed for the first time.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949, pt. 2
George Orwell
He went back to the table, dipped his pen, and wrote:
To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone—to a time when truth exists and what is done cannot be undone:
From the age of uniformity, from the age of solitude, from the age of Big Brother, from the age of doublethink—greetings!
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949, pt. 1
George Orwell
[P]ower is power over human beings. Over the body but, above all, over the mind. Power over matter—external reality, as you would call it—is not important. Already our control over matter is absolute.
George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949, pt. 1