George Orwell

I managed to get my copy of Ulysses through safely this time. I rather wish I had never read it. It gives me an inferiority complex. When I read a book like that and then come back to my own work, I feel like a eunuch who has taken a course in voice production.

George Orwell

I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and the people can be trusted to behave decently if you will only let them alone.

George Orwell

I’d like to start a religion. That’s where the money is.

George Orwell

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

If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable – what then?

George Orwell

If I had to make a list of six books which were to be preserved when all others were destroyed, I would certainly put Gulliver’s Travels among them.

George Orwell

If I had understood the situation a bit better I should probably have joined the Anarchists.

George Orwell

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.

George Orwell

If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

George Orwell

If you can feel that staying human is worth while, even when it can’t have any practical result whatsoever, you’ve beaten them.

George Orwell